The Home front in the 60’s and 70’s

1. The Home front in the 60’s and 70’s Modern US History Unit 4 Cold War May 7-8th, 2011

2. The children that grew up in the conformist society of the 1950’s became college students in the 1960’s. The 60’s were a time of breaking away from the mainstream culture and rebelling against everything that came before.

3. Music & the Counterculture • Many young people in America during the 60’s believed that the United States had become a cold and cruel place. They decided they had to break way from their established worlds and create their own idyllic way of living in what became known as the Age of Aquarius.

4. Music & the Counterculture • Members of this counterculture, called hippies, wanted to live in a setting of peace, love and harmony. Their existence involved three main things – rock’n’roll music, outrageous clothing and the liberal use of drugs. Many left their homes to live in the streets, parks or communes.

5. Music & the Counterculture • The idea behind the hippie culture was to ‘do your own thing’ and to express yourself in new ways. In different areas around the country, particularly Greenwich Village in NYC and the Haight-Ashbury district in SF, large populations of hippies lived together in harmony – at least for a while. One of the most common ways that they expressed themselves was through music.

6. Music & the Counterculture • The rock’n’roll of the 1950’s had melded into the mainstream by the 1960’s, and had become the anthem for the 60’s generation that would challenge “the establishment”. Several artists are iconic of the 1960’s including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

7. Music & the Counterculture

8. Music & the Counterculture • One of the most dramatic examples of rock’n’roll’s popularity and importance in the counterculture was a free music festival that took place in upstate New York called “Woodstock Music and Art Fair, and Aquarian Exposition.”

9. Music & the Counterculture • At this farm nearly 400,000 young people spent three days and nights listening to almost non-stop music. Artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, The Who and the Grateful Dead performed. Despite the crowd, the festival was actually peaceful and surprisingly well organized.

10. Protest Movements • Keep in mind that during this time, the fight for Civil Rights for African Americans was also occurring. College students that had been involved in the struggle for civil rights, returned to their campuses and began protesting their own lack of freedom of speech. This soon took the form of sit-ins, where the students took over the administration building and refused to move until their demands were met.

11. Protest Movements • The government could not ignore what was happening in America and President Johnson began a new plan to conquer poverty, which he named his plan for A Great Society. Johnson did not budge on the issue that many young people were protesting, though – the Vietnam War.

12. Protest Movements • As the war progressed, more protesters took to the streets and began to burn their draft cardsin protest of the war. These actions forever altered the role of America’s youth in society.

13. Protest Movements • These protests continued throughout the late 1960’s, until the end of the Vietnam War in 1971. The most disastrous of these protests however, took place at Kent State University in Ohio.

14. Protest Movements • A large student protest led to the burning of the ROTC building on campus in protest of the Invasion of Cambodia. In response the mayor of the town called in the Ohio National Guard to protect the campus. On May 4th, 1970 the guards fired into a crowd of protestors who were hurling rocks at them. Nine people were injured and four were killed.

15. Protest Movements

16. Protest Movements • Shortly following the Kent State shootings, a similar incident occurred at an all-black college in Alabama, where two more students were killed during an anti-war demonstration. These shootings prompted a debate amongst Americans about the use of force in controlling such demonstrations. Polls showed that many Americans supported the National Guard saying that students “got what they were asking for.”

17. Nixon & Watergate • As we saw in our documentary on the Vietnam War, Johnson was not everyone’s favorite president. So in 1968, after a short political hiatus, Richard Nixon was nominated by the Republican Party as their candidate for president. Nixon campaigned on the promise to restore law and order, but most importantly, to end the Vietnam War, which led him to win the election.

18. Nixon & Watergate • Although Nixon was very accomplished during his time as the President of the United States, most remember him not for his foreign policy, but for the scandal that caused him to resign halfway through his second term.

19. Nixon & Watergate • The Watergate Scandal was essentially the product of Nixon’s own paranoia. The scandal centers on the administration’s attempt to cover up a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate apartment complex in DC.

20. Nixon & Watergate • Five men were arrested in connection to the burglary. These men were part of a group called the plumbers – these men were charged with ensuring that there were no political leaks to the media. At this point the cover up begins – including asking the FBI to stop their investigation and paying nearly half a million dollars to the Watergate burglars for their silence.

21. Nixon & Watergate • The burglars went to trial and were convicted. After only three months in prison however the first man broke and confessed that others in the Nixon administration were involved. At this point the Senate convenes their own investigation of the matter, which yields some startling revelations.

22. Nixon & Watergate • The most important was the existence of tape recordings of almost all of Nixon’s conversations within the Oval Office. It was not until a year following this revelation that the tapes were released – they were however edited.

23. Nixon & Watergate • Despite the missing sections, the House Judiciary Committee determined their was enough evidence to impeach the president. On August 8th, 1974, Nixon announced his resignation from office.

24. The Feminist Movement • Unlike the protest movement of the 1960’s, the Women’s Liberation Movement lasted well into the 1970’s. The theory behind the movement was feminism, which is the belief that women should have economic, political and social equality with men.

25. The Feminist Movement • By the middle of the 1960’s nearly 40% of women worked outside the home and represented nearly 1/3 of the work force. They were however experiencing extreme job and wage discrimination. Many jobs were considered ‘men’s work’ and so women were not allowed to apply.

26. The Feminist Movement • Women were expected to work primarily as teachers, secretaries, social workers, nurses or in retail. President Kennedy appointed a special commission to report on women in the workplace – only to find that women were paid far less than men for the same jobs, and were often not promoted to management positions.

27. The Feminist Movement • In the organization of antiwar and civil rights protests, women also felt their inferior status, as it was predominately men who organized these events and would assign women to lesser roles

28. The Feminist Movement • These issues caused women to form small groups to discuss their concerns. Through these meetings, women realized that their experiences were not unique, but rather reflected a pattern of sexism and discrimination against women in the United States.

29. The Feminist Movement • One of the most influential texts of the early onset of the movement was The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. This book set out the discontent of women across the country and feelings of being unfulfilled that were experienced by many housewives. As the movement began to grow, leaders realized that they must first gain constitutional equality before attacking the social injustices.

30. The Feminist Movement • In 1966, several women, including Friedan, established the National Organization for Women (NOW), in order to more actively advocate for women’s rights.

31. The Feminist Movement • NOW pushed for less discrimination in the workforce, an increase in educational opportunities for women and resources for mothers such as childcare. Within the first three years the membership of NOW went from 300 to 175,000.

32. The Feminist Movement • Journalist Gloria Steinem, also helped to establish a group called the National Women’s Political Caucus, which encouraged women to enter politics. Steinem became a prominent figure in the feminist movement, most notably for creating the feminist publication Ms. Magazine.

33. The Feminist Movement • The women’s liberation movement helped to push legislation through congress that banned gender discrimination in any educational program or activities receiving federal financial assistance – this is known as Title IX.

34. The Feminist Movement • One issue that created a great amount of controversy during the movement however was a women’s right to have an abortion.

35. The Feminist Movement • NOW and other feminist groups supported Jane Roe in her claim that a woman’s right to an abortion is protected under the 14th amendment. In the landmark case, Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that women had the right to choose an abortion during the first three months of pregnancy.