Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (66 page)

The mostly optimistic and reformist
Zeitgeist
that characterized the early 1960s weakened rapidly after mid-decade.
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Only five days after signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in August, blacks began rioting in the Watts section of Los Angeles. By 1966 the interracial civil rights movement had split badly along racial lines, and advocates of "black power," among others, were renouncing non-violence. Waves of riots engulfed central cities between 1966 and 1968. American involvement in the Vietnam War, which escalated greatly between 1965 and 1968, provoked angry confrontations and demonstrations on college campuses, at draft boards, and at massive rallies in Washington and elsewhere. A number of college campuses were racked by protest and closed down at various times between 1967 and 1970. Hispanics, Native Americans, and feminists added to the air of tumult by demonstrating to promote their goals. In June 1969 homosexuals at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village fought back against police harassment, igniting five days of rioting by hundreds of people and arousing greater group consciousness among the gay population.
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Confrontation, violence, and social disorder indeed seemed almost ubiquitous in America during the mid- and late 1960s. In 1965 protestors at Berkeley proclaimed a "filthy speech movement," a degenerate form of the free speech demonstrations a year earlier, thereby hastening a trend toward open expression of profanity in American life. Hollywood brought out
Bonnie and Clyde
in 1967 and
The Wild Bunch
in 1969, films that reveled in the choreography of killing. Rock musicians jettisoned the lyrics of Dylan and Joan Baez for "acid rock." Television shows featured more and more graphic violence. The SDS broke apart, with a few of its splinter groups practicing violent revolution. More alarming than these scattered phenomena were broader and apparently related social indicators: rates of violent crime, drug abuse, and alcohol consumption, especially among young people, rose sharply after 1963.
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So did divorce and illegitimacy rates, which had been stable since the late 1940s.
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Scores on Scholastic Aptitude Tests began to fall after 1964. Most shocking of all, both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in 1968. In December 1969, as if to close the decade on a specially uncivilized note, a group of Hell's Angels, acting as security at a Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, California, beat a few concert-goers savagely with pool cues, stomped a stoned and naked young woman who tried to climb on stage, and stabbed to death a nineteen-year-old black man. The featured performers looked on uneasily but kept playing, and the cameras—making a commercial film about the Stones—kept rolling. Most rock fans in the huge audience of 500,000 seemed unaware of what had happened.
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D
RAMATIC THOUGH THESE CHANGES WERE
in the 1960s, they represented only the most widely noted aspects of an increasingly polarized era. The vast majority of Americans had little if anything to do with campus rebels, counterculturalists, or anti-war protesters. They were very much aware of the tumult—television lavished attention on it—but they went about their daily lives in familiar ways.
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As in the 1940s and 1950s, they celebrated traditional values and institutions such as the work ethic and monogamous marriage.
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Although ever-increasing percentages of women entered the paid work force, thus altering the dynamics of family life (and contributing to the falling off of the baby boom), most continued to do so in order to augment family resources: earning money for the home, not deep dissatisfaction with life in the two-parent nuclear family, largely explained their behavior.
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Feminist activism, while far more visible than it had been in the 1940s and 1950s, still engaged only a minority of American women, most of them young, white, well educated, and middle-class.

As they had in the 1950s, millions of upwardly mobile Americans rejoiced especially at the ever-enlarging capacity of a thriving economy to bring material comfort to their lives. The 1960s were the longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in United States history. Per capita income (in constant 1958 dollars) rose from $2,157 in 1960 to $3,050 in 1970, an unprecedented decadal increase of 41 percent. Prices remained stable until the late 1960s. Although unemployment among 16- to 19-year-olds rose alarmingly, overall unemployment stayed low, falling to 3.5 percent in 1969.
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Poverty as measured by the government declined rapidly, from an estimated 22 percent of the population in 1960 to 12 percent in 1969.
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By this time the 1950s—then the Biggest Boom Yet—seemed almost dowdy to contemporaries who remembered them. Many of the industries that had boosted that boom, such as electronics, enjoyed even more fantastic growth in the 1960s. Well-placed business and professional people came to expect as a matter of course an amazingly comfortable world that featured high-speed air travel, credit card transactions, and generous expense accounts. Architects and builders flourished, not only by catering to the explosively growing suburbs but also by designing and constructing nests of high-rise buildings in the business centers of cities. It was in the 1960s, the most glittering of times, that piles of glass and steel literally reached for the sky in urban America.

The astonishing affluence of the 1960s did much to promote the grand expectations that peaked in mid-decade. Millions of middle-class Americans—especially the youthful baby boomers—had already experienced rising levels of prosperity during the 1950s. Unaffected personally by the Depression or World War II, the boomers matured in a very different world from that of earlier, more deprived generations. Moreover, the young and the middle classes became much more numerous—and therefore more self-conscious and self-confident. The number of people aged 15 through 24 increased from 24 million in 1960 to 35.3 million in 1970, a jump of 47 percent. By then they accounted for 17.5 percent of the population, an all-time postwar high.
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Increasingly large percentages of these young people went to colleges and universities, which also boomed as never before in the 1960s. Many came to believe that they had the knowledge and the resources to create a progressive, advanced society like none before in human history. Some identified themselves as participants in a "new class"—of experts in everything from engineering to social science to policy-designing. Their brimming, "can-do" certitude stimulated grand expectations about the capacity of government to solve social problems. Even more than in the 1950s, it seemed that there were no limits.

As these expectations expanded, millions of Americans began not only to anticipate ever-greater social and technological progress but also to believe that they had "rights" to all sorts of blessings, including profound psychological satisfaction. They imagined, often narcissistically, that they could achieve great personal "growth" and "self-actualization."
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What earlier generations had considered as privileges, many in this one came to perceive as entitlements. In personal life this meant rapid gratification; in policy matters it meant deliverance from evil. Anything, it seemed, was possible in this protean time in history. People talked confidently about winning "wars" against contemporary problems, ranging from poverty to cancer to unrest in Vietnam. Some thought that they could combat not only the age-old scourges of human life—Disease and Disability—but also two others: Discontent and Dissatisfaction.
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These grand expectations also affected the behavior of groups. Government, many groups argued, must act to guarantee their "rights." The rights revolution that ensued engaged not only the established pressure groups—labor unions, corporations, farm organizations, blacks—but also others, including Native and Hispanic Americans ("red power" and "brown power") and feminists, who formed the National Organization for Women in 1966. Athletes, too, organized: the Major League Baseball Players Association came into being in 1966.
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"Public interest" groups rose to demand laws to protect the environment and to improve the quality of life in myriad other ways. Elderly Americans, including militants who became known as the Grey Panthers, developed especially powerful lobbies. Even poor people got together, creating the National Welfare Rights Organization in the late 1960s and angrily denouncing Congress when it failed to meet their demands. The proliferation of these self-conscious groups, some of which (such as "seniors-only" enclaves) virtually excluded others, added to a perception by the early 1970s that the United States was becoming both a claimant society and an ever more openly balkanized culture.

The often utopian expectations stimulated in the rights revolution crashed against these and other forces by the late 1960s. Much of the rancor that thereafter roiled American life arose from the increasingly sharp disjunctures that developed between grand expectations and the more prosaic realities of American heterogeneity, notably the barriers erected by differences of class, region, gender, and race. Further rancor arose from the resentment of "ordinary" people against the special claims—many of them grandiose indeed—of the interest groups. There were limits after all. The disjunctures dominated American life for decades after the 1960s.

Still, the depth of these divisions was not altogether clear until the late 1960s, for progress before then seemed continuous and unending. Scientific and technological "breakthroughs" appeared regularly. In 1961 Haloid Xerox Corporation, started in 1959, became Xerox Corporation and transformed the ways in which institutions conducted their business. So did large, mainframe computers. Air-conditioning spread widely and promoted enormous economic growth in the South and Southwest. Television, equipped with videotape, began working wonders in its coverage of news and sports: "Wide World of Sports" appeared for the first time in 1961 and instant replay in 1963. In 1961 Dr. J. Vernon Luck, Sr., became the first surgeon successfully to reattach a severed limb—of a construction worker whose arm had been mangled in a freeway accident. Six years later a South African surgeon, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, presided over a team that managed the world's first successful human heart transplant. And the space program, set in motion by President Kennedy in 1961, captured the imagination of millions. On July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon. Americans were thrilled to hear him proclaim, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." President Richard Nixon, speaking for many, boasted that the moon shot was "the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation."
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Many standbys of popular culture, too, offered reassuring continuities to Americans in the 1960s. Big-time sports captured ever-larger audiences, both live and on TV. Vince Lombardi, coach of the powerful Green Bay Packers football team, extolled the virtues of hard work and discipline and became something of a cult figure among Americans who proclaimed traditional values. Winning, he said, wasn't an important thing—it was the only thing. Television, too, continued to feature familiar prime-time programs along with its more violent fare. These included such hardy perennials as "The Lawrence Welk Show," "The Lucy Show," and "The Tonight Show" (which Johnny Carson took over in 1962 and stayed with for thirty years).
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"The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet," which had started in 1952, lasted through 1966, "Gunsmoke" from 1955 until 1975. Sitcoms such as "The Beverly Hillbillies" and "Petticoat Junction" retained solid followings for most of the decade.

The continuing popularity of other forms of popular culture also revealed the persistence of mainstream tastes. Millions of people showed little interest in rock, enjoying instead popular songs like Henry Mancini's "Moon River" (1961) and "Days of Wine and Roses" (1962).
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In 1965 viewers flocked to see
The Sound of Music
, a happy, sentimental film about the singing von Trapp family. It earned more than $100 million on its first run and outdid
Gone with the Wind
as the all-time best-selling movie.
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Four years later Walt Disney productions brought out
The Love Bug
, which became the top-grossing movie of the year, attracting far more people in that year than countercultural films such as Easy
Rider
and
Alice's Restaurant
. While attendance and sales figures do not tell the whole story, by any means, about popular tastes, they suggest an obvious continuity: millions of people still demanded non-threatening "family" entertainment. Sensational media accounts focusing on cultural "revolution" in the 1960s left a false impression of the decade: significant continuities were a feature of popular culture during the sixties.

Firmly established American attitudes toward world politics also changed very slowly during the 1960s. While McCarthyite excesses had ebbed, a virulent anti-Communism still flourished at most levels of American politics and culture. Robin Moore's book
The Green Berets
, which celebrated the exploits of a big "Nordic type" in charge of America's Special Forces, sold 1.2 million copies within two months of its issuance in paper in late 1965. When the movie version came out in 1968, starring John Wayne, it did very well at the box office.
Patton
, which (somewhat ironically) highlighted the military exploits of "Blood and Guts" George C. Patton, was the Best Picture of the Year in 1970.
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