Together with the Beats and rock music, this vocal minority of the “silent generation” heralded a youth movement that would explode in the 1960s.
Towards a New Left
The liberal-minded minority of American college students of the early sixties were lightly receptive to the idealism of the civil-rights movement. They were the opposite of “the silent generation“ of the 1950s and were determined to change this stereotype. Their icons from the fifties were the “Beat Poet“ Allen Ginsberg and pop culture rebels like Elvis “the Pelvis“ Presley and James Dean(“Rebel Without a Cause“) With the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 they lost an idolized leader. They couldn´t identfy themselves with JFK´s successor Lyndon B. Johnson. They critizised his “Great Society “, his coarse personal style and above all his escalation of the Vietnam War. The initial momentum for the “New Left“ was contributed by the so-called “red-diaper babys“, the descendants of old-time socialists. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) elvolved from the League for Industrial Democracy. In 1962 Tom Hayden wrote its founding document, the Port Huron Statement, which issued a call for "participatory democracy" based on non-violent civil disobedience. The New Left opposed the prevailing authority structures in society, which it termed "The Establishment," and those who rejected this authority became known as "anti-Establishment." Loosely associated with the New Left was the Berkeley Free Speech Movement which began in 1964 as a coalition of student groups at the University of California, Berkeley which opposed restrictions to political activity on campus.By the end of 1966 the SDS became a leading organization of the antiwar movement on college campuses during the Vietnam War.The most popular of SDS’s rallying cries, “Make Love Not War!” became the motto for the antiwar movement. SDS organized draft-card burnings and disruptions of ROTC(reserve officers training classes)units. As opposition to the war grew stronger, the SDS became a nationally prominent political organization, but at the same time opposing the war became an overriding concern that overshadowed many of the original issues that inspired the New Left.
Youth- and Counterculture
The sense of estrangement and desire for a change led some youth want to remake society. Rejecting order, reason, monogamy, and social responsibility as “hangups,” some joined communes or tribes—group living arrangements so-called “contercultures“ in which the members renounced individualism, new consciousness and private property and sought to coexist in noncompetition and harmony.
The quest for a new consciousness usually led to drugs(“you could take a trip without a ticket,”) Historian Theodore Roszak wrote in the late 1960s, “It would hardly seem an exaggeration to call what we see arising among the young a ‘counter culture’:meaning, a culture so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society.” Experimenting with drugs would have a greater personal effect on more young Americans than the political activities of the New Left.Drug use came easy to a generation that had been conditioned to find happiness through consumption—one whose parents used nicotine and alcoholic beverages to make it through the day and depended on amphetamines and tranquilizers, society’s acceptable “uppers” and “downers.” The high priest of LSD was Timothy Leary, a former Harvard psychologist fired in 1963 for encouraging students to experiment with drugs—to “tune in, turn on, drop out.” Influenced by LSD’s reality-bending effects, the counterculture sought a world without rules, one in which magic and mysticism replaced science and reason.Bands like The Doors of Perception and the Grateful Dead, launched the San Francisco sound of “acid rock”—the perfect marriage of “sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.” The counterculture celebrated its vision of a life of freedom and harmony for all on 3 days in August 1969, when nearly four hundred thousand young people gathered on farmland in New York’s Catskill Mountains for the Woodstock festival. They reveled for three days and nights in the music of dozens of rock stars, swam nude in the lake, and openly shared drugs, sexual partners, and their-contempt for the Establishment. The counterculture heralded the festival as the dawning of an era of love and peace, the Age of Aquarius.
