(Warning - long post. Read it if you like - or not. Comment if you like - or not.)
Someone on another forum site I use started a thread on the 1960's - a decade most of the posters don't remember much about - or were born too late to remember anything at all about that. So I posted this, to fill in some of the details:
Quote I was born in 1947 so I remember the mid-50's pretty well, and the '60s REALLY well, having come of age then. Interesting decade, both politically and culturally:
Middle school years (1960 - 62): Kennedy elected. Big excitement because he was the first non-Protestant president. Also at the time the youngest president ever sworn into office. And Jackie still had her killer fashion model good looks and style.
Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis: Bay of Pigs was a total humiliating fiasco that played out on the radio and TV in real time as we got our ass kicked. Cuban missile crisis was much more scary. Back then everyone knew where the public fallout shelters were and some people even built fallout shelters of their own. A nuclear attack on the U.S. was something people thought was quite possible and feared. The presence of Soviet Missiles in Cuba and the macho showdown Kennedy started over it made this all seem even more real and scary. But we were not nearly as scared as recently declassified documents show we should have been. Most of us were scared a bit, but thought that in all likelihood this would all pass without mass annihilation. Turns out, the fingers on both sides were hovering over the buttons the whole time until Khrushchev decided that maybe the destruction of the world was a bad idea and backed down.
Favorite TV shows among middle-schoolers: Three Stooges (on the air just after school every day in nearly all markets). Rocky & Bullwinkle on Sunday afternoons.
High School and College Years: ((1963 - 1970):
Kennedy Assassination: I doubt anyone who was 5 or older at the time can't tell you EXACTLY where they were when they heard the news. It happened at the end of the work week, so the entire country pretty much shut down until after the funeral in the early part of the next week. Nothing was on TV but live coverage of the unfolding events. You couldn't get away from it.(there were just 3 commercial network channels plus, sometimes, and "educational channel" in each city). Jack Ruby shot Oswald live on all three network broadcasts.
Johnson: Kennedy didn't just almost start a nuclear war and escalate the situation in Vietnam. He had a lot of good ideas like Medicare, a Civil Rights Act, and a War on Poverty. But he didn't make a whole lot of progress getting any of this enacted into law. But LBJ was an old skool Texas machine politician who knew how to get things done "by any means available" using knowledge of everybody's dirty little secrets and political favors they owed him or could get out of him. A year or so after he took office the politics of the U.S. had changed completely.
Culturally - The musical Bye Bye Birdie was all the rage. Several tunes from it got significant top-40 air play. Much of the plot centered on The Ed Sullivan Show - there was hardly a household in the U.S. without a TV set tuned into this every single Sunday night. This is where most of us saw Elvis and the Beatles on TV for the first time.
And the Beatles started a major shift in popular music in this country. Their popularity spread to all the other major bands in the London scene, creating the British Invasion - the Billboard Top 10 was dominated by British groups for most of the decade. The U.S. groups and artists like Jefferson Airplane, Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkle, and even The Monkees that made the charts on a regular basis were heavily influenced by the British Invasion sound. American blues, all but moribund in this country, was revived big time by Brits like Eric Clapton who hired all the old guys from the U.S. as warmup acts and put them on stage in their own country when they started doing U.S. tours.
James Bond and his imitators were the movie gods. Late nite TV shifted from Jack Parr to Johnny Carson. But the original host of "The Tonite Show", Steve Allen did a syndicated show for a couple years that was big inspiration to David Letterman a couple decades later. The Smothers Brothers made prime time comedy TV subversively political. "Laugh In" made it trivial. Star Trek was a new show with generally low ratings, but a major cult hit with the college crowd.
Hugh Hefner(anyone remember him?) was somewhat popular - I think he published a magazine. Cosmopolitan filled the niche for an equivalent for women. Their most famous "pinup of the month" was Burt Reynolds.
And then there was Woodstock. And then Altamont. (did I forget to mention the media celebrity of the Hells Angels and all the biker flicks with Hells Angel extras that eventually inspired Easy Rider?)
And then there's the drug scene - all those stories about LSD sugar cubes and San Francisco hippies in the Haight. What began as the "Beatles Haircuts" that could get you sent home from HS until you went to the barber became a political statement against the Vietnam war and the entire mindset of parents and authority figures over the age of 30. And weed and psychedelics were a big part of the rebellion - not to mention the "sexual revolution".
The "sexual revolution" was mostly all about "nice girls can do it now." But sexism remained. One protest movement (thought up by guys) to encourage draft card burning was "Girls Say Yes to Guys Who Say No". And to discourage police brutality, march organizers told the crowd to move the "chicks up front". The feminist movement started around the same time - but it took years for the organizers to decide whether it should be about womens' liberation in politics and the work force or male bashing, anti-pornography crusades, and general opposition to heterosexuality. ("A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" became a popular t-shirt slogan during the early 70's.)
Conflict and More Assassinations: But these changes weren't universally welcomed. The John Birch Society emerged as the major right-wing nut group. The KKK rose from the grave to become a major political force in the deep south. Followers of ML King doing their sit ins, marches and Freedom Rides routinely were beaten by mobs and thrown in jail. A church Sunday school in Birmingham was bombed. Police dogs were set on marchers in the same city. It took national guard protection to get black students registered in previously all-white high schools and colleges.
The list of the assassinated is a long one that includes Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King and the three civil rights workers murdered by the Klan in Mississippi.
Then there were those students shot dead by the national guard at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi.
By the middle of Johnson's only term in office, we were up to our armpits in the rice paddies of Vietnam. Everyone was at risk of being drafted out of college (college deferments ended before the end of the decade). The knowledge that you might die in a pointless war before you were 21 is one reason why nobody in college paid any attention when the older generation tried to tell us "drugs are dangerous". Rumors of great weed getting into the U.S. smuggled in body bags spread all over campus.
By the end of the decade the Democrat convention in Chicago had turned into a police riot and the organizers of the anti-war demonstrations there were sentenced to prison. Nixon was elected to office and Ronald Reagan was governor of California.
Welcome to the '70s ya fukin' hippies!
Time to put on your suits and join the establishment. Why not try one of those big financial firms? There's big money in Wall Street and the real estate market. Now if you can only those pesky regulations lifted. Maybe the Republicans can help.
"A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having" - V
Originally posted Friday, November 13, 2009 (2 years ago)
This is pretty cool.
I remember the tail end of the 60s, man landing on the moon, and all that. But I was living in a different country, a different continent - the life we experienced there was vastly different from what you had here in the USA.
I put together a book earlier this year about my family, and collected stories from great-aunts and -uncles ... it was "quaint" to read about their lives, much the same as I imagine some of our yehoodites think when they're reading your narrative. But it's as much history as what we learn in school - and hopefully remembering the awful of the past will help us not make the same mistake again ... reality tells me we will anyway, because humans are like that, but I still hope.
"Change your thoughts, and you change your world" - Norman Vincent Peale.
Originally posted Friday, November 13, 2009 (2 years ago)
Quoted from "OpeningMinds" ... it's as much history as what we learn in school.
More so, I hope. The history taught in school is highly censored by the powers that be. When I went to elementary school in the 50's the most significant historical events that had shaped our world were the rise of the Nazis in Europe, the dominance of the Japanese in Asia, and the biggest and most destructive war the world had ever seen. But you wouldn't think that if all you had to go on were the history textbooks used in the U.S. public schools. Almost all of the history discussed in these books happened before 1900. The twentieth century (which was already more than half over) got a single short chapter at the end, which generally was not assigned as a reading by the teachers or included in the quizzes.
And today, I wonder just how much about the McCarthy era that created the political climate that cowed the educational establishment to pretend the first half of the twentieth century didn't exist is taught in the schools today. Do the school textbooks in the U.S., for example, point out that the words "under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance were put there by the right wing ideologues that orchestrated the witch hunt purges of alleged "Communists"? (The idea was to have the Pledge point out that WE were not godless atheists like the enemy.) Or that public school teachers in the 1950's all had to swear "anti-Communist loyalty oaths" written by the right wing Congress as a condition of keeping their jobs?
And are the incidents at Kent State and Jackson State mentioned in any school textbooks?
Even in the more accurate and comprehensive readings used in college history classes, I'm not sure you will find much information about the fact that in the 1920's the KKK was such a dominant force in several states that it had achieved major influence over the Democrat party, especially during Presidential election year conventions. The state of Indiana in particular was completely run from the level of the Governor on down by the KKK (which controlled the ruling Democrat party in Indiana, just as they controlled the "Dixicrat" Democrat state parties in the south). Had it not been for a grisly rape scandal involving the head of the Indiana Klan which broke the power of the night riders not only in Indiana, but nationally, by the late 1930's we might have had a government in power in the U.S. that would have allied with Nazis, not one that was prepared to go to war with them.
I could go on ... but I think the point is made. School, especially school prior to HS graduation, is not a good place to learn history.
"A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having" - V
Memories of the Sixties
(Warning - long post. Read it if you like - or not. Comment if you like - or not.)
Someone on another forum site I use started a thread on the 1960's - a decade most of the posters don't remember much about - or were born too late to remember anything at all about that. So I posted this, to fill in some of the details:
"A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having" - V
Yehoodi Featured Topics
(2 items total, 30 per page)
This is pretty cool.
I remember the tail end of the 60s, man landing on the moon, and all that. But I was living in a different country, a different continent - the life we experienced there was vastly different from what you had here in the USA.
I put together a book earlier this year about my family, and collected stories from great-aunts and -uncles ... it was "quaint" to read about their lives, much the same as I imagine some of our yehoodites think when they're reading your narrative. But it's as much history as what we learn in school - and hopefully remembering the awful of the past will help us not make the same mistake again ... reality tells me we will anyway, because humans are like that, but I still hope.
"Change your thoughts, and you change your world" - Norman Vincent Peale.
More so, I hope. The history taught in school is highly censored by the powers that be. When I went to elementary school in the 50's the most significant historical events that had shaped our world were the rise of the Nazis in Europe, the dominance of the Japanese in Asia, and the biggest and most destructive war the world had ever seen. But you wouldn't think that if all you had to go on were the history textbooks used in the U.S. public schools. Almost all of the history discussed in these books happened before 1900. The twentieth century (which was already more than half over) got a single short chapter at the end, which generally was not assigned as a reading by the teachers or included in the quizzes.
And today, I wonder just how much about the McCarthy era that created the political climate that cowed the educational establishment to pretend the first half of the twentieth century didn't exist is taught in the schools today. Do the school textbooks in the U.S., for example, point out that the words "under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance were put there by the right wing ideologues that orchestrated the witch hunt purges of alleged "Communists"? (The idea was to have the Pledge point out that WE were not godless atheists like the enemy.) Or that public school teachers in the 1950's all had to swear "anti-Communist loyalty oaths" written by the right wing Congress as a condition of keeping their jobs?
And are the incidents at Kent State and Jackson State mentioned in any school textbooks?
Even in the more accurate and comprehensive readings used in college history classes, I'm not sure you will find much information about the fact that in the 1920's the KKK was such a dominant force in several states that it had achieved major influence over the Democrat party, especially during Presidential election year conventions. The state of Indiana in particular was completely run from the level of the Governor on down by the KKK (which controlled the ruling Democrat party in Indiana, just as they controlled the "Dixicrat" Democrat state parties in the south). Had it not been for a grisly rape scandal involving the head of the Indiana Klan which broke the power of the night riders not only in Indiana, but nationally, by the late 1930's we might have had a government in power in the U.S. that would have allied with Nazis, not one that was prepared to go to war with them.
I could go on ... but I think the point is made. School, especially school prior to HS graduation, is not a good place to learn history.
"A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having" - V
(2 items total, 30 per page)
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