Main Event
No generation was influenced more thoroughly by popular music than that of the 60s. The roots of rock may be found in African-American popular music, especially the blues, and was first popularized among white youngsters in the 1950s by a cadre of young pop performers, most notably Elvis Presley, who electrified the nation by his 1956 appearance on TV’s popular Ed Sullivan Show. But by the early 1960s, American rock had hit the doldrums and was losing its young audience.
Then in 1964, a quartet of “Mod”-clothed, mop-headed British teenagers calling themselves the Beatles toured the United States. Influenced by American rockers Chuck Berry and Presley, guitarists John Lennon and George Harrison, bass player Paul McCartney, and drummer Ringo Starr infused this American-born music with a new vitality, freshness, and electricity. Their 1964 tune, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” unleashed “Beatlemania” in this country and paved the way, first for a “British invasion” of other English bands and then for the development of a redefined American rock idiom.
Rock music became the ceaseless anthem of the decade., the beat of rebellion and of the solidarity of youth.
Word for the Day
D-lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD, LSD25, and acid, is a hallucinogenic drug discovered in 1943 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. LSD produces powerful sensory distortions, with visual (and sometimes auditory) hallucinations. In the 1960s, such LSD experiences were called acid trips and were thought to be mind or consciousness expanding.
Real Life
When Richard Nixon was buried at his boyhood home in Yorba Linda, California, following his death in 1994, the nation, almost in spite of itself, paid homage to a president who betrayed his oath of office—the only chief executive in U.S. history to resign office.
Born on January 9, 1913, Nixon overcame a financially pinched childhood and excelled in school, becoming a successful lawyer, then serving in the navy during World War II. Returning from the war, Nixon ran for Congress from California’s 12th district in 1946, handily winning after he attacked his Democratic opponent, Jerry Voorhis, as a communist. From that point on, Nixon focused on communism as his principal political theme. Reelected to the House in 1948, Nixon defeated Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas in a 1956 Senate race, accusing her of communist leanings (“pink right down to her underwear”).
In 1952, the 39-year-old Nixon was tapped as running mate of Dwight D. Eisenhower and served as vice president through Ike’s two terms. Nixon earned particular respect in 1955 when he effectively and confidently filled in for Eisenhower as the president recovered from a heart attack.
In 1960, Nixon became the Republican candidate for president, only to lose the election by a mere 100,000 votes to John F. Kennedy. Discouraged, Nixon ran for California governor two years later and was defeated, telling reporters that they wouldn’t “have Nixon to kick around anymore.”
But Nixon returned as a presidential candidate in 1968, defeating Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey. As president, Nixon reached out to-the Soviet Union and China, beginning a gradual thaw in the Cold War. Through foreign policy advisor (later secretary of state) Henry Kissinger, Nixon engineered a painful U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. On the domestic front, he developed what he called the “New Federalism,” cutting back on federal programs and shifting power as well as responsibility back onto state and local governments.
The 1972 elections swept Nixon back into office for a second term; however, his campaign tactics involved a myriad of illegal activities, and, after a lengthy congressional inquiry, Nixon resigned office on August 9, 1974. He accepted a pardon from his successor, Gerald R. Ford, and spent the rest of his life writing works of autobiography and foreign policy. He died cloaked in the mantle of elder statesman.
Women, Crisis, and a Call to the Great Communicator
(1963-1980)
In This Chapter
Feminism and the fate of the ERA
An energy crisis triggered by OPEC
A plague of economic and social woes
The Iran hostage crisis
Election 1980
The 1960s marked a period of self-examination in the United States, an era of sometimes liberating reflection and sometimes debilitating self-doubt. During the decade, women joined African-Americans and other minorities in calling for equal rights and equal opportunity. In the course of the following decade, all Americans were forced rethink attitudes about growth, expenditure, and the natural environment as the fragility of the nation’s sources of energy was dramatically exposed. Then, in 1980, after 20 years of often painful introspection, Americans elected a president whose resume included two terms as California’s governor and a lifetime as a movie actor. His message to the nation was to be proud and feel good—a message Ronald Wilson Reagan’s fellow Americans eagerly embraced.
A Woman’s Place
The sweet land of liberty was largely a man’s world until 1920, when women, at long last, were given the constitutional right to vote. Yet that giant stride changed remarkably little about American society. The first presidential election in which women had a voice brought Warren G. Harding (1865-1923) into office, embodiment of the status quo, whose very campaign slogan promised a “return to normalcy.” No, it would take a second world war to bring even temporary change to gender roles and sexual identity in the United States.
From Rosie the Riveter to The Feminine Mystique
The national war effort spurred into action by the December 7, 1941, surprise attack on Pearl Harbor required maximum military force and maximum industrial production. But if the men were off fighting the war, who would run the factories? Women answered the call in massive numbers, invading traditionally male workplaces. Posters exhorting workers to give their all for war production often depicted a woman in denim overalls and bandana, wielding a rivet gun like an expert. She was Rosie the Riveter, symbol of American womanhood in World War II.
For most American women, the war was their first experience of life in a workplace other than the home. Women faced new responsibilities but also tasted new freedom and independence. Yet when the war ended, the women, for the most part, quit their jobs, married the returning soldiers, and settled into lives as homemakers.
Throughout the 1950s, relatively few women questioned their role in the home. With the beginning of the 1960s, however, the American economy started a gradual shift from predominantly manufacturing-based to service-based industries, and women soon began finding job opportunities in these venues. Propelled in part by the powerful advertising medium of television, the 1960s were also driven by headlong consumerism. Increasing numbers of women found it necessary (or desirable) to earn a second income for their product-hungry families.
In 1963, writer Betty Friedan sent a questionnaire to graduates of Smith College, her alma mater. She asked probing questions about the women’s satisfaction in life, and the answers she received were sufficiently eye opening to prompt her to write a book, The Feminine Mystique. Its thesis, based on the Smith questionnaire and other data, was that American women were no longer universally content to be wives and mothers. They were, in fact, often the unhappy victims of a myth that the female of the species could gain satisfaction only through marriage and childbearing. The Feminine Mystique, an instant bestseller, struck a chord that caused many women to reexamine their lives and the roles in which society had cast them.