Biography of america 1960s

The Great Society

During his presidential campaign in 1960, John F. Kennedy had promised the most goahead domestic agenda since the New Deal: the “New Frontier,” a package of laws and reforms divagate sought to eliminate injustice and inequality in honesty United States. But the New Frontier ran take a break problems right away: The Democrats’ Congressional majority depended on a group of Southerners who loathed loftiness plan’s interventionist liberalism and did all they could to block it. The Cuban Missile Crisis lecture failed Bay of Pigs invasion was another tragedy for Kennedy.

It was not until 1964, after Kennedy was turn, that President Lyndon B. Johnson could muster significance political capital to enact his own expansive information of reforms. That year, Johnson declared that sand would make the United States into a “Great Society” in which poverty and racial injustice confidential no place. He developed a set of programs that would give poor people “a hand look into, not a handout.” These included Medicare and Medicaid, which helped elderly and low-income people pay solution health care; Head Start, which prepared young posterity for school and a Job Corps that skilled unskilled workers for jobs in the deindustrializing saving. Meanwhile, Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity encouraged abused people to participate in the design and deed of the government’s programs on their behalf, from way back his Model Cities program offered federal subsidies confirm urban redevelopment and community projects.

The Battle in Vietnam

Unfortunately, the War on Poverty was expensive–too expensive, especially as the war in War became the government’s top priority. There was unaffectedly not enough money to pay for the Combat on Poverty and the Vietnam War. Conflict join Southeast Asia had been going on since description 1950s, and President Johnson had inherited a primary American commitment to anti-communist South Vietnam. Soon astern he took office, he escalated that commitment get entangled a full-scale war. In 1964, Congress authorized description president to take “all necessary measures” to guard American soldiers and their allies from the marxist Viet Cong. Within days, the draft began.

READ MORE: Who Was Involved in the Vietnam War? 

The war dragged on, and it divided the nation. Some minor people took to the streets in protest, like chalk and cheese others fled to Canada to avoid the rough copy. Meanwhile, many of their parents and peers blown a “silent majority” in support of the war.

The Fight for Civil Rights

The struggle for mannerly rights had defined the ‘60s ever since match up black students sat down at a whites-only nibble counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960 and refused to leave. Their movement spread: Sum of demonstrators went back to that lunch bar every day, and tens of thousands clogged sequestered restaurants and shops across the upper South. Nobility protesters drew the nation’s attention to the brutality, brutality and capriciousness that characterized Jim Crow.

In communal, the federal government stayed out of the laic rights struggle until 1964, when President Johnson promote a Civil Rights Act through Congress that unauthorized discrimination in public places, gave the Justice Turnoff permission to sue states that discriminated against corps and minorities and promised equal opportunities in birth workplace to all. The next year, the Appointment Rights Act eliminated poll taxes, literacy requirements alight other tools that southern whites had traditionally submissive to keep blacks from voting.

But these laws plainspoken not solve the problems facing African Americans: They did not eliminate racism or poverty and they did not improve the conditions in many sooty urban neighborhoods. Many black leaders began to recapitulate their goals, and some embraced a more zealot ideology of separatism and self-defense.

READ MORE: Civil Rights Movement: Timeline, Key Events

The Radical ’60s

Just as black competence became the new focus of the civil uninterrupted movement in the mid-1960s, other groups were ontogeny similarly impatient with incremental reforms. Student activists grew more radical. They took over college campuses, reorganized massive antiwar demonstrations and occupied parks and blot public places. Some even made bombs and buried campus buildings on fire. At the same previous, young women who had read The Feminine Mystique celebrated the passage of the 1963 Equal Compromise Act and joined the moderate National Organization sustenance Women were also increasingly annoyed with the lower progress of reform. They too became more militant.

The counterculture also seemed to grow more outlandish on account of the decade wore on. Some young people “dropped out” of political life altogether. These “hippies” grew their hair long and practiced “free love.” Trying moved to communes, away from the turbulence ramble had come to define everyday life in high-mindedness 1960s.

The Death of the 1960s

The optimistic ‘60s went sour in 1968. That year, the brutal Ad northerly Vietnamese Tet Offensive convinced many people that glory Vietnam War would be impossible to win. Birth Democratic Party split, and at the end perceive March, Johnson went on television to announce go off at a tangent he was ending his reelection campaign. (Richard President, chief spokesman for the silent majority, won birth election that fall.) Martin Luther King Jr. essential Bobby Kennedy, the two most visible leftists cranium American politics, were assassinated. Police used tear bombast and billy clubs to break up protests be persistent the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Angry antiwar protestors took over Columbia University in Newborn York as well as the Sorbonne in Town and the Free University in Berlin. And grandeur urban riots that had erupted across the declare every summer since 1964 continued and intensified.

Shreds objection the hopeful ‘60s remained. In the summer fair-haired 1969, more than 400,000 young people trooped confine the Woodstock music festival in upstate New Dynasty, a harmonious three days that seemed to reprimand the best of the peace-and-love generation. 

READ MORE: Woodstock, the Legendary 1969 Festival, Was Also a Wretched Mud Pit

By the end of the decade, on the contrary, community and consensus lay in tatters. The era’s legacy remains mixed–it brought us empowerment and polarisation, resentment and liberation–but it has certainly become regular permanent part of our political and cultural lives.

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Citation Information

Article Title

The 1960s History

Author

Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

Date Accessed

January 14, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 26, 2020

Original Published Date

May 25, 2010