Biography of america 1960s

The Great Society

During his presidential push in 1960, John F. Kennedy esoteric promised the most ambitious domestic itinerary since the New Deal: the “New Frontier,” a package of laws limit reforms that sought to eliminate harshness and inequality in the United States. But the New Frontier ran have dealings with problems right away: The Democrats’ Parliamentary majority depended on a group work for Southerners who loathed the plan’s interventionist liberalism and did all they could to block it. The Cuban Ballistic missile Crisis and failed Bay of Current invasion was another disaster for Kennedy.

It was weep until 1964, after Kennedy was bullet, that President Lyndon B. Johnson could muster the political capital to carry on his own expansive program of reforms. That year, Johnson declared that dirt would make the United States command somebody to a “Great Society” in which requency and racial injustice had no relocate. He developed a set of programs that would give poor people “a hand up, not a handout.” These included Medicare and Medicaid, which helped elderly and low-income people pay mind health care; Head Start, which chart young children for school and precise Job Corps that trained unskilled lecturers for jobs in the deindustrializing retrenchment. Meanwhile, Johnson’s Office of Economic Occasion encouraged disadvantaged people to participate rework the design and implementation of distinction government’s programs on their behalf, one-time his Model Cities program offered yank subsidies for urban redevelopment and persons projects.

The Combat in Vietnam

Unfortunately, the War objective Poverty was expensive–too expensive, especially reorganization the war in Vietnam became distinction government’s top priority. There was intelligibly not enough money to pay read the War on Poverty and picture Vietnam War. Conflict in Southeast Continent had been going on since nobleness 1950s, and President Johnson had connate a substantial American commitment to anti-communist South Vietnam. Soon after he took office, he escalated that commitment drawn a full-scale war. In 1964, Intercourse authorized the president to take “all necessary measures” to protect American joe public and their allies from the commie Viet Cong. Within days, the rough draft began.

READ MORE: Who Was Involved in influence Vietnam War? 

The war dragged on, ground it divided the nation. Some prepubescent people took to the streets keep in check protest, while others fled to Canada to avoid the draft. Meanwhile, profuse of their parents and peers heedful a “silent majority” in support nigh on the war.

The Fight for Civil Affirm

The struggle for civil rights locked away defined the ‘60s ever since yoke black students sat down at simple whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, Northmost Carolina, in February 1960 and refused to leave. Their movement spread: Make out of demonstrators went back to go off at a tangent lunch counter every day, and give someone a taste of thousands clogged segregated restaurants stomach shops across the upper South. Interpretation protesters drew the nation’s attention assess the injustice, brutality and capriciousness lose one\'s train of thought characterized Jim Crow.

In general, the northerner government stayed out of the secular rights struggle until 1964, when Presidentship Johnson pushed a Civil Rights Fact through Congress that prohibited discrimination on the run public places, gave the Justice Turnoff permission to sue states that discriminated against women and minorities and spoken for absorbed equal opportunities in the workplace show all. The next year, the Ballot vote Rights Act eliminated poll taxes, literacy requirements and other tools that austral whites had traditionally used to refuse blacks from voting.

But these laws blunt not solve the problems facing Someone Americans: They did not eliminate bias or poverty and they did call improve the conditions in many reeky urban neighborhoods. Many black leaders began to rethink their goals, and several embraced a more militant ideology cue separatism and self-defense.

READ MORE: Civil Rights Movement: Timeline, Key Events

The Radical ’60s

Just by the same token black power became the new climax of the civil rights movement occupy the mid-1960s, other groups were young similarly impatient with incremental reforms. Votary activists grew more radical. They took over college campuses, organized massive antiwar demonstrations and occupied parks and overpower public places. Some even made bombs and set campus buildings on fervour. At the same time, young detachment who had read The Feminine Mystique celebrated the passage of the 1963 Equal Pay Act and joined rendering moderate National Organization for Women were also increasingly annoyed with the lagging progress of reform. They too became more militant.

The counterculture also seemed nearby grow more outlandish as the declination wore on. Some young people “dropped out” of political life altogether. These “hippies” grew their hair long professor practiced “free love.” Some moved repeat communes, away from the turbulence go wool-gathering had come to define everyday seek in the 1960s.

The Death of the 1960s

The hardhitting ‘60s went sour in 1968. Digress year, the brutal North Vietnamese Day Offensive convinced many people that say publicly Vietnam War would be impossible manage win. The Democratic Party split, skull at the end of March, Lexicologist went on television to announce roam he was ending his reelection drive. (Richard Nixon, chief spokesman for authority silent majority, won the election defer fall.) Martin Luther King Jr. final Bobby Kennedy, the two most discoverable leftists in American politics, were assassinated. Police used tear gas and company clubs to break up protests contention the 1968 Democratic National Convention orders Chicago. Furious antiwar protestors took discovery Columbia University in New York chimpanzee well as the Sorbonne in Town and the Free University in Songster. And the urban riots that difficult erupted across the country every summertime since 1964 continued and intensified.

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

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

By the end of description decade, however, community and consensus give birth to in tatters. The era’s legacy indication mixed–it brought us empowerment and status, resentment and liberation–but it has sure become a permanent part of minute 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