The Counterculture

1
The Counterculture

• AMST 3100 The 1960s
• Rutledge

2
The War at Home

• The rise of the counterculture reflected a loss
  of faith in the liberal reforms promoted by John
  Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
• As faith and idealism toward liberal reforms
  declined, radicalism grew among specific elements
  of American society. Many of these late 1960s
  radicals came from the frustrated civil rights
  advocates, college students, frustrated war
  protestors, Hispanic youth, feminists, gays, and
  youth culture in general.
• Radicals believed that the system itself was too
  corrupt for the changes needed and it was time to
  tear it down and rebuilt it into a more
  democratic, inclusive (multicultural),
  peace-oriented, and egalitarian system.

3
Blacks From Civil Rights to Black Power

• By the mid-1960s, SNCC had split apart from the
  SCLC.
• The SCLC remained a liberal reform movement with
  the basic goal of racial assimilation.
• At first, the SCLC envisioned SNCC as their own
  youth group spin-off, but by 1964 SNCC did not
  agree with this characterization.
• SNCC, led by increasingly radicalized people like
  Stokely Carmichael in 1966, began to reject the
  American Dream of assimilation to advocate a more
  rapid and radical change toward black
  nationalism.
• SNCC had become more skeptical toward the system.
  It had tackled racism in the Deep South and had
  seen federal agents passively watch SNCC members
  be brutalized by Southern racists.

4
Rising SNCC Radicalism

• The beginning of the split between the SCLC and
  SNCC probably occurred during the famous 1963
  March on Washington where King gave his I Have a
  Dream speech.
• John Lewis, the leader of SNCC at that time, had
  written a speech that was critical of the federal
  government. Lewiss script asked the question,
  Which side is the federal government on? That
  sentence and other critical commentary was
  censored by organizers of the March to avoid
  offending the JFK administration.
• Lewis and others had become frustrated at the
  passivity of the Kennedy administration.
• Then they went through Freedom Summer and
  proffered the MFDP at the 1964 Democratic
  Convention, only to be insulted by a gesture of
  2 token seats. Now it was LBJ who frustrated
  SNCC, and SNCC stormed out. The system itself was
  broken, they concluded.

5
James Meredith

• SNCC would continue to see a lack of sincere
  action on the part of the political system. The
  problem wasnt just the Dixiecrats, they
  concluded. It was the system itself, with its
  entrenched backstage power brokers who were too
  friendly to the status quo.
• On June 5, 1966, James Meredith started a solo
  march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi to
  protest racism. His march was called the March
  Against Fear. Meredith was gunned down by a
  sniper soon after starting this march.
• This event helped galvanize rising black
  frustration at the system. Stokely Carmichael of
  SNCC vowed to continue the march in Merediths
  name.

6
Black Power!

• The March Against Fear continued. On June 16,
  1966 Stokely Carmichael arrived with other
  marchers at Greenwood, Mississippi and was
  promptly arrested for trespassing when they tried
  to set up camp. Here, Carmichael delivered a
  speech in which he said,
• "This is the twenty-seventh time I have been
  arrested and I ain't going to jail no more! The
  only way we gonna stop them white men from
  whuppin' us is to take over. What we gonna start
  sayin' now is Black Power!"

7
Malcolm X

• The father of the Black Power movement was
  probably Malcolm X. He was a charismatic and
  influential leader within the Nation of Islam who
  had already become radicalized by the time of the
  1963 March on Washington.
• He was a strong advocate of militant
  self-defense, and the FBI had been watching him
  for quite a while.
• While he mostly adhered to the Nation of Islam
  (Black Muslim) teachings, Malcolm X also broke
  from these teachings to embrace black
  nationalism.
• One of his ideological struggles was between
  black separatism (from all other races) versus a
  racially integrated black Muslim movement. He was
  intelligent and ultimately learned to think for
  himself and not rely on ideological dogma to do
  his thinking for him. This probably cost him his
  life, because he was murdered in February, 1965,
  by members of the Nation of Islam for not being
  true to Nation of Islam dogma.

8
Black Power!

• The Black Power movement was a rejection of the
  liberal reformist assimilation ideal promoted by
  Martin Luther King, Jr.. They argued that
  assimilation robs black people of their own
  identity and heritage.
• Rather, Black Power advocates sought racial
  separation in order to preserve their unique
  African-American identities, which had been
  robbed by the European colonialists and American
  slave traders of the past.
• This movement was a celebration of black
  nationalism (or black identity), complete with
  their own black-run institutions. They argued
  that blacks had to learn to be self-sufficient
  and to fight oppression on their own terms. This
  included organizing community self-help groups in
  the inner cities, as well as an assertion that
  Black is Beautiful, a rediscovery of African
  names, and a celebration of Black culture.

9
Black Power!

• Black power advocates also rejected the
  nonviolent approach of Dr. King, favoring
  violence if used for self-defense.
• The peace and love thing that King advocated was
  over for most Black Power advocates. It was a
  time for new militancy - to stand up and say Im
  black and Im proud.
• This new militancy was particularly aimed at the
  police, who patrolled ghettos like Watts in Los
  Angeles as though they were an occupying colonial
  army. It was time to fight internal colonization.
• This was not a complete rejection of nonviolence.
  To black power advocates, however, nonviolence
  was a strategy whereas to Martin Luther King, Jr.
  it was a principle.
• To Stokely Carmichael, blacks needed to unite in
  solidarity, develop a class consciousness, and
  become self-reliant.

10
The Black Panthers

• The Black Panther Party (BPP) was formed in
  October, 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, and
  was the inner city expression of the Black Power
  Movement.
• It was originally called the Black Panther Party
  for Self-Defense, and was founded in Oakland
  California.
• The Party embraced the basic ideals of the black
  power movement. Essentially it was an expression
  of this movement by poor young blacks who were
  frustrated at the failure of the War on Poverty
  and other reforms of the establishment to make a
  real difference in the ghetto.
• The Black Panthers developed a Ten-Point program
  calling for Land, Bread, Housing, Education,
  Clothing, Justice And Peace, among other things.
  They instituted a variety of community action
  programs to alleviate poverty and gave young
  black teens positive role models of disciplined,
  responsible behavior.

11
The Black Panthers

• While Stokely Carmichael embraced Black Power,
  Huey Newton and Bobby Seale embraced the Marxist
  notion of power to the people! and considered
  the black underclass an urban proletariat.
• The Black Panthers would aid in their development
  of a revolutionary class consciousness.
• The Black Panthers eventually forged alliances
  with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the
  Youth International Party (YIPPIES), the Chicago
  Brown Berets, and even the Gay Liberation Front.
• The BPP was most active between 1966 and 1972.

12
The Black Panthers

• The Black Panthers were not very well understood
  by mainstream whites, however. The corporate
  media tended to emphasize their militancy
  (despite the fact that it was mostly
  self-defensive) and this frightened suburban
  whites into fears of a race war.
• Charles Manson tried to exploit this fear in his
  1969 Tate-Labianca murders. These murders, like
  the Altamont Festival that year, helped signal
  the death of the idealistic 1960s.
• The police were particularly concerned about this
  new black militancy. J. Edgar Hoover and other
  white authorities developed COINTELPRO, a secret
  illegal counter-intelligence program intended to
  infiltrate and disrupt the BPP and other civil
  rights organizations of the 1960s.

13
The Black Panthers

• The BPP opposed police brutality in the ghetto.
  At that time, the police force was not yet
  integrated and consisted mostly of less-educated
  conservative white males, many of whom were
  racists.
• One of the reforms advocated by liberal reformers
  was the integration of the police force. By 1972,
  the police force would be integrated.
• Both the Panthers and the police died in violent
  confrontations that were shown on the nightly
  news programs. At least 30 Black Panthers died in
  such conflicts by 1970. It is likely that both
  sides initiated conflict, although the Panthers
  always claimed self-defense.
• This was an era of black urban riots. There were
  more than 130 urban riots between 1965 and 1967,
  with another hundred or more following the death
  of Martin Luther King in April, 1968.

14
The Decline of the Black Panthers

• In August, 1967, the FBI instructed COINTELPRO to
  neutralize what they called black nationalist
  hate groups and the BPP was targeted for
  elimination. While the SCLC, SNCC, and the Nation
  of Islam had also been targeted by COINTELPRO,
  the Black Panthers were their primary target.
• The tactics of COINTELPRO included infiltration,
  misinformation, to divide and destroy leadership
  as well as various wings of the movement, and
  even the instigation of violence.
• By 1972, thanks mostly to COINTELPRO in
  combination with the internal disintegration of
  the BPP, the Black Panthers were effectively
  eliminated as a viable threat to the
  establishment.

15
The Student Movement

• White students paid attention while SNCC was
  morphing toward the Black Panther Party.
• SNCC had become a role model organization for
  white activists, too.
• Like SNCC, college students were initially
  idealistic about changing the world.
• Students were also influenced by youth culture
  themes that pitted the older generations values
  against the emerging values of the youth culture.
• It would be the Vietnam War along with the
  restriction of free speech on college campuses
  that would galvanize the emerging student
  movement.

16
The Port Huron Statement

• In 1962, the Students for a Democratic Society
  (SDS) met in Ann Arbor, Michigan to produce a
  manifesto.
• The manifesto produced was very similar to the
  1960 statements of SNCC. They were full of hope
  and idealism, they advocated direct action, and
  they showed faith in American institutions for
  reform.

17
These SDS students were disturbed by many
features of American life

• The Bomb, the Cold War, militancy, and American
  foreign policy imperialism
• Bureaucracy and over-rationalization
• The concentration and centralization of power in
  Big Government and Big Business
• Organization Man style bland careerism
• The blind conformity found on college campuses
  along with in loco parentis and administrative
  authoritarianism
• Above all, the injustice of racism.

18
The 1962 Port Huron Statement pledged to do the
following

• To revitalize American democracy
• To create communities with meaningful work and
  leisure activities
• To make corporations more publicly accountable
• To respect the environment
• To respect the natural dignity of humans and
  human life
• To use diplomacy rather than militancy as the
  basis of foreign policy
• To achieve racial equality

19
The Student Movement

• In 1962, the baby boomers were attending
  universities in huge, galvanizing numbers.
• A college degree was now required for many middle
  class jobs.
• Most students came from the growing middle class
  and had come from economically secure families.
  They could afford to think big.
• They were aiming for something more than mere
  security they were aiming for happiness and a
  humane social world.
• Given their affluence, these students were more
  free to think critically about the shortcomings
  of the consumer society.
• And in college, they learned about
  existentialism, humanism, and the Constitution
  (with its Bill of Rights).

20
The Student Movement

• These idealistic students began to push for
  reforms at first within the university itself.
• They had been moved by the Civil Rights Movement
  and saw it as an opportunity to take a stand.
• Many joined SNCC and participated in Freedom
  Summer. These students brought back the lessons
  they learned form SNCC.
• Most also came to share the belief that the
  problem was not a few bigoted individuals in the
  South, but rather it was the larger
  establishment. It was the system itself.

21
The Student Movement

• These idealistic young white students returned to
  their college campuses with a radical message
• Many of the social problems were built into
  established institutions which function to
  maintain the status quo and which were being run
  by a managerial elite, or what C. Wright Mills
  called the power elite.
• The students, frustrated with their bland school
  newspaper, began to publish these ideas in their
  own underground newspapers. This was the start of
  the Free Speech Movement.

22
The Free Speech Movement

• This movement began in Berkeley in 1964, and it
  involved the SDS.
• On college campuses, an example of institutional
  corruption involved the rights of the students
  toward free speech.
• Colleges had become over-rationalized
  administrative bureaucracies, with lots of formal
  rules and regulations imposed on students.
• At UC-Berkeley, the administration ruled that
  noncampus political literature could not be
  distributed on campus.
• This seemed an open violation of academic ideals,
  so students dug in, just as the administrators
  did.

23
The Free Speech Movement

• Berkeley became a rallying point for other
  college campuses to protest the absence of free
  speech.
• The SDS embarked on a campaign across Northern
  urban regions to organize people, and eventually
  they succeeded in winning many of these free
  speech campaigns.
• This did not involve SNCC, because by 1964 SNCC
  was purging its white membership. By 1965, SDS
  and SNCC operated as two separate movements, with
  no dramatic overriding issue linking university
  life to black culture.
• Yet such an issue was just emerging. LBJ had
  decided to escalate the Vietnam War and by 1965
  the draft was becoming an issue. It would be
  Vietnam that would provide the common galvanizing
  issue that united various elements of the
  counterculture into a powerful force.

24
Teach-Ins

• Vietnam was becoming increasingly relevant on
  college campuses for several reasons
• At that time college students were deferred from
  the draft, so colleges had become safe havens
• The draft politicized the war and forced young
  people to learn about Vietnam
• College campuses did military research and had
  Reserve Officer Training Cores (ROTC) offices.
• By 1965, many campuses offered teach-ins on
  Vietnam, often sponsored by SDS.
• These teach-ins were initially idealistic, but
  became futile as the antiwar protestors witnessed
  the escalation of the war.
• By 1965 there were 175,000 U.S. troops in
  Vietnam, and Johnson was still rapidly escalating
  the war.

25
The Anti-War Movement

• By 1966, antiwar protestors were matching the
  governments escalation of the war with their own
  escalation of strategy a draft resistance
  movement along with rising radicalism against the
  military-industrial complex.
• Throughout 1966-1967, antiwar confrontations
  escalated. Government officials were confronted
  with mass protestors wherever they went. On
  college campuses, ROTC programs were being
  challenged, and these protestors were also
  questioning college military contracts.

26
The Rise of the Counterculture

• The Vietnam War provided the galvanizing element
  that united the various protestors of the 1960s.
• The counterculture was very broad. It was a loose
  group of single-interest subcultures which came
  together because of rising alienation from
  established institutions.
• Most of these groups had started out idealistic
  about the prospects for reform, but had become
  frustrated with the establishments slow pace of
  change. The escalation of the war provided a
  dramatic example of the establishments failure
  to change.
• Much of this confrontation was over deep core
  values about what America stood for.

27
Polarization of Western Culture

• America, like other Western cultures at this
  time, was becoming polarized over two different
  sets of values.
• If the dominant culture promoted individualism,
  the counterculture promoted communalism.
• If the dominant culture promoted competition, the
  counterculture promoted cooperation.
• If the dominant culture promoted careerism, the
  counterculture promoted personal self-discovery.

28
The Counterculture

• The counterculture developed its own music,
  fashion and lifestyles to symbolize its
  alternative value system.
• Many stopped wearing formal clothing and embraced
  inexpensive loose-flowing dresses and casual
  jeans and t-shirts as their anti-fashion
  statements.
• More than anything else, the counterculture stood
  for freedom and empowerment (against the
  authoritarian establishment).
• By the mid-1960s, Vietnam, along with the
  lifestyle elements symbolizing personal freedom
  (sex, drugs, and rocknroll) united the
  disparate elements of the counterculture.

29
The Counterculture

• The music of the counterculture had become
  increasingly political with anti-establishment
  messages.
• Folk artists, with their emphasis on substantive
  lyrics, were at the crest of the wave. Artists
  like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Phil
  Ochs, and Simon and Garfunkel spoke to youth
  culture alienation and the alienation of social
  marginals.
• Eventually pop-rock bands like the Beatles and
  the Rolling Stones would join in and the
  counterculture would become a force that could
  not be ignored.
• The capital of the counterculture was San
  Francisco, with Haight Ashbury the center of the
  hippie element and Oakland, only 20 miles away,
  the center of the antiwar radical element.

30
The Counterculture

• Drugs represented another countercultural
  sacrament. Smoking pot became a ritual
  symbolizing shared membership, with the joint
  passed from person to person in a communal
  manner.
• Smoking pot was also an act of illegal defiance
  of the law. It symbolized the willingness of the
  person to take a risk for something they stood
  for.
• Pot also heightened the senses, and the 60s
  lifestyle promoted self-discovery as merged with
  hedonism.
• Being was more important than becoming.
• One was to learn by experience not just by
  reading books as Jimi Hendrix captured on his
  first album (1967), entitled Are You
  Experienced?
• By 1967 the countercultural lifestyle was a
  Western culture sensation and San Francisco had
  become Mecca.

31
The Counterculture

• By the end of 1967, the student movement had
  reached a crossroads.
• One the one hand, respectable officials had
  turned against the war and there was growing
  debate among the straights.
• By the Fall of 1967, only a little more than half
  the American public still supported the war.
• On the other hand, the more radical students had
  lost faith in Americas capacity to reform its
  institutions. These folks advocated a radical
  reconstruction of our basic institutions.
• They saw Vietnam as a symptom of a deeper
  problem.
• Which way the student movement would go would be
  decided by the pivotal year of 1968.

32
The Womens Movement

• The womens movement was another element of the
  counterculture that emerged in the early 1960s
  but which did not clearly galvanize until the
  late 1960s and early 1970s.
• Although womens roles had changed toward wage
  work since World War II, there was no
  corresponding shift in womens ideals.
• Sexism, the belief that women are naturally
  inferior to men, was still popular during the
  1960s. The prevailing attitude was that women
  belonged in family roles.
• Sociologists term this the cult of domesticity.
  Women are viewed as exclusively mothers and
  wives, with opposite characteristics compared
  with men If men are rational, then women must be
  emotional and if men are strong then women must
  be weak. Her natural place is in the home.

33
The Womens Movement

• In the 1960s, most jobs were still
  sex-segregated. Women suffered under a
  patriarchal system that paid men higher wages.
• By the 1960s, most middle class women had at
  least a part-time job, yet these jobs continued
  to be womens jobs that paid low wages and
  offered little upward mobility.
• Many women were so deeply ingrained into the
  ideology of traditional gender roles that they
  considered it heresy to question them. The woman
  was supposed to stand by her man.
• At that time, unlike the civil rights movement,
  there was no critical mass of protestors to
  provide an alternative ideology.

34
The Feminine Mystique, 1963

• Unlike the black civil rights movement, women
  initially tended to see their problems as
  individual rather than social. Their unhappiness
  was due to flaws in their own personal lives.
• In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine
  Mystique. This book exposed womens problems as
  similar to the problems of racial minorities, and
  not simply the result of the personal troubles.
• Like blacks, women had been oppressed because of
  their ascribed characteristics their physical
  differences.
• In the Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan explained
  how she became a good wife and mother, but she
  felt that she was limited in these two roles and
  that she could contribute more to society by
  having additional roles.
• This book helped ignite the modern womens
  movement.

35
The Womens Movement

• The basic principles of the civil rights movement
  are humanism and equality and these messages
  are just as relevant to women as the are to
  racial minorities. In this way, the civil rights
  movement helped bring about the womens movement.
• The 1964 Civil Rights Act included sex
  discrimination as an incidental feature that was
  not taken very seriously at that time by
  Congress. Indeed, the government initially failed
  to act on complaints of sex discrimination, just
  as they had been slow to act on racial
  discrimination earlier.
• In 1966, a group of activists formed NOW, the
  National Organization for Women, to pressure for
  the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act.

36
The Womens Movement

• Many of the early NOW members had experience
  working with SNCC, the SCLC and SDS and they knew
  how to build a movement.
• Yet they had been frustrated in those other
  activist groups because even those groups tended
  to be patriarchal.
• Women were routinely steered toward clerical work
  and away from leadership roles.
• In 1964, black women at SNCC even staged a sit-in
  to protest their sexist treatment by the men of
  SNCC. Women were beginning to think that they
  needed their own liberation movement.
• The SDS also suffered from patriarchy.

37
The Womens Movement

• As women came together to share their personal
  experiences, they developed a new sense of
  strength and solidarity (class consciousness).
• By 1967, many women activists decided they needed
  to control their own agenda and they began to
  meet separately from men.
• This led to consciousness raising sessions, where
  small groups of women would gather and discuss
  their issues. Men were not allowed in these
  meetings, largely because men tend to interrupt
  women (another aspect of patriarchy).
• In these sessions, women identified a key
  structural problem in Western society
  male-dominated institutions. The goal of the
  womens movement was womens equality.

38
The Counterculture

• In 1967, the womens movement was viewed largely
  as a side-show. The ultimate impact of womens
  liberation would not be felt until the 1970s.
• Chafe argues that there were three pivotal
  movements during the 1960s that would shape the
  society the civil rights movement, the
  student-antiwar movement, and the womens
  movement.
• A fourth movement we will discuss later might be
  the environmental movement, which began in the
  late 1960s as blossomed in the 1970s.

39
Summary of Value DifferencesMainstream Culture
VS The Counterculture

• Emphasis on Individual
• Competition
• Achievement
• Group superiority values
• Conformity/obedience
• Materialism and money
• Authoritarianism
• Militarism/imperialism
• Rationality/bureaucracy
• Self-discipline
• Delayed gratification

• Community
• Cooperation
• Happiness
• Equality social justice
• Freedom
• Spiritualism, sharing
• Democracy
• Diplomacy/sovereignty
• Emotionality/tribalism
• Laid back, go with the flow
• Immediate gratification

40
The Counter-response

• Inevitably the protestors sparked a backlash of
  resentment.
• There was never a time during the 1960s when the
  protestor activists represented a majority of the
  American population.
• The majority of Americans felt their way of life
  was under assault. They had devoted their lives
  to conforming to the dominant culture.
• The louder the protestors were, the more
  resistant and hostile was the backlash.
• In 1964, only 34 of whites believed that blacks
  were seeking too much too fast. By 1966, that
  figure climbed to 85 as cities were burning and
  Black Power! could be heard from the ghettos.

41
The Counter-response

• Some of the backlash was due to blue collar
  workers feeling threatened by minority gains.
• Now their jobs were less secure because they
  would have to compete with blacks and women.
• By the late-60s, Vietnam had caused inflation
  which threatened the incomes of Americans.
• Some of the blue collar backlash was also due to
  the nature of the counterculture. Many working
  class workers resented these middle class
  spoiled students who were not taking school
  seriously.
• This helps explain why there were so many police
  riots directed against the counterculture. Part
  of this was generational hostility, and part was
  class hostility.

42
The Counter-response

• The Silent Majority of Americans sensed a
  crisis in values.
• Every day they turned on the TV to see protestors
  challenging traditional values and beliefs.
• Yet during unstable times many people have a
  tendency to cling to these traditional values.
• They believed their sacred values of blind
  patriotism, religion, monogamy, hard work,
  consumerism, traditional sexuality,
  know-your-place ethnicity, conformity to Biblical
  and political authority, and traditional gender
  roles were under attack.
• By 1968 they began to rally around the flag with
  messages like America love it or leave it.

43
AMST 3100
End