In 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said his most famous words: “I have a dream. ” He was not the only one who felt this way. For many, the 1960s was a decade in which their dreams about America might be fulfilled. For Martin Luther King Jr. , this was a dream of a truly equal America; for John F. Kennedy, it was a dream of a young vigorous nation that would put a man on the moon; and for the hippy movement, it was one of love, peace, and freedom. The 1960s was a tumultuous decade of social and political upheaval.
We are still confronting many social issues that were addressed in the 1960s today. In spite of the turmoil, there were some positive results, such as the civil rights revolution. However, many outcomes were negative: student antiwar protest movements, political assassinations, and ghetto riots excited American people and resulted in a lack of respect for authority and the law. The first president during the 1960s was John F. Kennedy. He was young, appealing, and had a carefully crafted public image that barely won him the election.
Because former President Eisenhower supported the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, and because many had doubts about Kennedy’s outh and Catholic religion, Kennedy only received three-tenths of one percent more of the popular vote than Nixon. The first thing Kennedy did during his brief presidency was to try to restore the nation’s economy. Economic growth was slow in 1961 when Kennedy entered the White house. The President initiated a series of tariff negotiations to stimulate exports and proposed a federal tax cut to help the economy internally.
John F. Kennedy was known as one of the few presidents in history who made his own personality a significant part of his presidency and a focus of national attention. Nothing llustrated this more clearly than the reaction to the tragedy of November 22, 1963. Kennedy was driving through the streets of Dallas. The streets were full of cheering people watching him drive by. The President was surrounded by loud motorcycles driven by the Secret Service. One onlooker, looking into a sixth floor window, noticed another man with a rifle. “Boy! ,” he said. “You sure can’t say the Secret Service isn’t on the ball.
Look at that guy up there in the window with a rifle” (Pett 12). That man with the rifle was not a member of the Secret Service. A fraction of a second before 12:30 p. m. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was smiling broadly. He would never smile again. The Kennedy assassination touched everyone around the world. In Canada, for example, Eaton’s Company put full-page advertisements in newspapers such as The Hamilton Spectator saying, “With all Canada and the World, we share the shock and grief inflicted by the tragic death of a great statesman and a great hero” (see appendix A).
Nevertheless, there was one good thing that came out of it: Lyndon B. Johnson became president. Throughout Johnson’s five-year career, sweeping reforms were made in every corner of the country. First, Johnson created Medicare– a program to provide federal aid to the elderly for medical expenses. Medicare had been debated for years in Congress, but Johnson’s plan eliminated many objections. First, Medicare benefits were available to all elderly Americans, regardless of need. Second, doctors serving Medicare patients could practice privately and even charge their normal fees.
Later, the Johnson Administration issued Medicaid, which gave assistance to all ages. Next, Johnson established a new cabinet agency in 1966: the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This agency, together with the newly formed Model Cities rogram, was invented in an effort to stop the decaying of cities and end poverty. Also, the Omnibus Housing Act gave rent supplements to the poor. Finally, Johnson created the Office for Economic Opportunity. This program led to new educational, employment, housing, and health-care developments.
However, the Office for Economic Opportunity failed because there was inadequate funding and the government was more concerned with the Vietnam War. Johnson also wanted to strengthen the country’s schools. First, his administration implemented the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which xtended aid to private and parochial schools based on the needs of the students. Also, he created the National Endowment of Arts and Humanities, and passed the Higher Education Act, which gave federally financed scholarships. Another subject that concerned the government under Lyndon B.
Johnson Administration and the rest of America was Civil Rights. In 1964 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, and in 1965 they passed the Voting Rights act. The Civil Rights Movement did not just affect American minorities, but everyone who lived in the United States at the time. The momentum of the previous decade’s civil ights gains led by Reverand Martin Luther King carried over into the 1960s. But for most blacks, the tangible results were minimal. Only a small percentage of black children actuall attended integrated schools, and in the South, “Jim Crow” practices barred blacks from jobs and public places.
New groups and goals were formed to push for full equality. As often as not, white resistance resulted in violence. In 1962, during the first large-scale public protest against racial discrimination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a dramatic and inspirational speech in Washington, D. C. during a march on the capital. The Negro,” King said in his speech, “lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity and finds himself an exile in his own land” (Gitlin 77). Under leaders like Martin Luther King, blacks were trying attain all the rights a white man would have.
In 1965, King and other black leaders wanted to push beyond social integration, now guaranteed under the previous year’s Civil Rights Act, to political rights. Reverend King announced that as a “matter of conscience and in an attempt to arouse the deepest concern of the nation,” (Gitlin 84) he was oompelled to lead another march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. When the marchers reached the capitol, they were to have presented a petition to Governor George Wallace protesting voting discrimination. However, when they arrived, the Governor’s aides came out and said, “the capitol is closed today” (Gitlin 85).
Unfortunatley, the event that moved the Civil Rights Movement most significantly was the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1965. Moments after the assassination, terrible cruelty replaced the harmony. Rioting mobs in Watts, California pillaged, killed, and burned, leading to the death or injury of undreds and millions of dollars in damage. Besides the Civil Rights movement, there was another important movement during the 1960s: the Student Movement. Youthful Americans were outraged by the intolerance of their universities, racial inequality, social injustice, and the Vietnam War.
The Student Movement led to the hippy culture. This movemt marked another response to the decade as the young experimented with ,usic, clothes, drugs, and a counter-culture lifestyle. Hippies preached altruism, mysticism, honesty, joy, and nonviolence. In 1969, they held the famous Woodstock Festival for peace n New York, a three day concert that emphasized their beliefs. One of the chief movemtns that came from the Student Movement were the antiwar protests during the Vietnam War. The United States firsbecame directly involved in Vietnam when Harry Truman started to underwrite the costs of France’s war against Viet Minh.
Later, the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy increased America’s political, economic, and military committments in the Indochina region. Starting with teach-ins in 1965, the massive antiwar efforts centered on the colleges, with the students playing the lead roles. The teach-in approach was at first a gentle approach to the antiwar activity. But soon other types of protest grew to replce it. These demonstrations were one form of attempting to go beyond mere words and to “put direct pressure on those who were conducting policy in an apparent disdain for the will expressed by the voters” (Spector 30).
In 1965, the United States started strategic bombings of North Vietnam, catalyzing the public opinion of what was happening in the region. These bombings helped sustain the antiwar prostests and spawned new ones, “and the growing cost of American lives coming ome in body bags only intensified public opposition to the war” (Gettleman 54). The antiwar movemtn spread directly among the combat troops in Vietnam, who began to wear peace symbols and flash peace signs in movement salutes. Some units even organized their own demonstrations to link with the activity at home.
Between 1965 and 1966, the American military effort in Vietnam accelerated from President Johnson’s decisions. By 1967, America’s military authority was breaking up. Not only was it the worst year of Johnson’s term, but also one of the most turbulent years in the nation’s history. The war in Southeast Asia and the war at home dominated newspaper headlines and the attention of the White House. 1967 witnessed urban riots, like the deadly uproar in Detroit. Only a quarter of Americans approved of his handling of the war in 1968.
The antiwar movement that began as a small trickle became a giant flood. Americans were soon shocked to learn about the communists’ massive Tet Offensive on January 31, 1968. The offensivedemonstrated that Johnson had been making the progress in the war seem greater than it really was; it appeared to have no end. Johnson withdrew from he election in 1968, and the communists planned to do battle with their new adversary, Richard Nixon. Besides the unsuccessful Vietnam campaign, the United States was also involved in another unsuccessful battle: the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1963.
The story behind the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs is one of mismanagemnt, overconfidence, and lack of security. The blame for the failure of the operation falls directly on the lap of the Central Intelligence Agency and a young president and his advisors. The fall out from the invasion created a rise in tension between the two great superpowers, and, ironically, 6 years later, the person that the invasion meant to topple, Fidel castro, is still in power. However, not all events during the sixties hindered the country’s progress.
At the end of 1968, Americans became the first human beings to reach the moon. Seven months later, they were the first to actually walk on the moon. Their telecast gave earthbound viewers an unforgettable site. The austronauts looking at the moon were even more amazed. “The vast loneliness up here is awe-inspiring,” said austronaut Lovell. “It makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth” (http://www. ksc. nasa. gov, see appendix B). Advances were also made in medicine and health. The medical introduction of the “pill” changed the interaction between the sexes dramtically in 1964.
Americans discovered that the freedom from fear of unwanted pregnancy went hand in hand with other kinds of sexual freedom. The sixties became an era in which pleasure was being considered as a constitutional right rather than a privalege, inwhich self-denial became increasingly seen as foolish rather than virtuous. Each pill contains one thirty-thousandth of an ouce of chemical, but it changed the sex and family lives of a large segment of the American population. Another type of chemical, chemical pestisides, were also important in the 1960s.
A book written by Rachel Carson described for the first time the dangers of using pesticides. Carson believed that the poisonous chemicals were taking a dreadful toll, and that the only way to fix the situation was to “let the balance of nature take care of the number of insects” (Carson 17). Another poisonous chemical was being used on humans. Mistakes made in the past caused a great deal of health problems to children around the world when it was discovered that using a tranquilizer called thalidomide aused severe birth defects.
Babies were born with hands and feet like flippers, attached to the body with little or no arm or leg. Every compound drug containing the sedative was taken off the market. The 1960s began under the shadow of the Cold War and ended under the shado wo fthe Vietnam War. What happened inbetween was a series of dreams, failures, and realities that have made the sixties one of the most tumultuous decades in the history of the United States. From assassinations to Woodstock, the 1960s was an era of confusion in which every American tried to make his dream a reality.
