Overview
The decade of the 1960s was a time of great change in American culture. The winds of change, sometimes more like a tornado, swept across the cultural landscape, uprooting the old and depositing the new. These changes were exciting, troubling, horrifying, energizing, depending on one’s individual attitudes toward past traditions and beliefs. Every historical period brings some transformations, but the 1960s seemed to replace an old world with a new one. Even those Americans who wanted to remain faithful to past practices could not totally resist what was happening around them.
If change was like a powerful tornado in the 1960s, the decade began instead with a light breeze, significant but generally welcome. Modernization was in the air. For the first time, the country would have a president born in the 20th century, regardless of the outcome of the 1960 election. That choice was aided by a new force in politics—television. The first televised presidential debates occurred, and the electronic medium gave its blessing to Senator John F. Kennedy over Vice President Richard Nixon. The Massachusetts Democrat was handsome, charming, and self-confident; the camera liked him, and so did the voters. On Inaugural Day, the former war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, in his 70s, turned the White House over to the 43-year-old Kennedy, the youngest man ever elected president, and to his beautiful wife, Jacqueline, and their young children, Caroline and John. The decade was off and running.
The country quite literally was running, as the new President pushed a program to get America more physically fit while the First Lady set the style in women’s fashions. Dark clouds occasionally blew by, first a failed invasion of Cuban exiles with U.S. support at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, and then a confrontation with the Soviet Union over Russian missiles in Cuba. The former led President Kennedy to advocate construction of fallout shelters, and the latter brought the possibility of nuclear war home to Americans who, despite their fears, did not fully understand how close they had actually come to war. Yet these events failed to dampen the optimism most Americans felt in a nation enjoying economic prosperity and continued status as the greatest of the world’s superpowers.
Women were flocking to stores and poring over Sears catalogs to find a pillbox hat like the kind that Jackie wore. At home, they were trying new recipes that Julia Child demonstrated on public television and giving some thought to a new type of kitchen appliance called the microwave, still too expensive for most families. Fathers and mothers, if they had not already done so, were thinking of moving their families to suburbs and considering adding a second car, possibly the cute and economical Volkswagen Beetle. Shopping was more convenient with the spread of shopping malls where consumers could find lots of shops grouped close together and plenty of parking space. A McDonald’s probably stood nearby, offering a quick hamburger, fries, and soft drink. Life was good for most Americans.
Literature and the arts moved farther away from established traditions, sometimes building on changes that had started in the previous decade, such as the birth of rock and roll, most prominently displayed in the late 1950s by Elvis Presley. New directions in literature were ushered in by the Beats, including the 1950s Bibles of the Beat generation, Howl, a poem by Allen Ginsberg decrying the dullness of the Eisenhower years and heralding the coming of a vibrant counterculture, and the autobiographical novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac. As the 1950s turned into the 1960s, Andy Warhol switched from commercial art to serious, realistic depictions of objects and people from popular culture. Images of soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles became art, and pop art became the artistic rage of the decade, forever mangling the old distinction between high and low art. Before long, Roy Lichtenstein was borrowing comic-strip techniques for his canvases.
Much of the nation’s confidence and optimism were derailed when on November 22, 1963, an assassin’s bullet shattered the nation’s innocence. The Kennedy years, known as Camelot after the idealistic reign of king Arthur portrayed in the popular musical of the early 1960s, ended with the death of the young president, and change, which had seemed so benign, increasingly grew more complex, mixing good with bad, celebrations of human creativity with violence, dissent, and divisiveness.
Other assassinations would follow: Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, and the dead president’s brother, then running for that position himself, Robert Kennedy. The longest war in American history, the Vietnam War, heated up steadily during the second half of the decade and generated such powerful antiwar sentiment that the country was ripped apart over the conflict as millions of young men and women began seriously to question (often demonstrating against) not only their national government but anything that smacked of traditional authority. By the late 1960s, millions of adults had joined the young in opposing the war, but they were less likely to share the younger generation’s interests in drug use, including LSD and marijuana. Nor did the older generation much like the new, freer sexual attitudes. "Make love, not war" was a common slogan that fused two paths of resistance to inherited norms regarding sexuality and patriotism.
A young rock group calling themselves the Beatles landed on American shores in 1964, starting a revolution that swept through music and fashion. When they performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, the result was "Beatlemania," a kind of crazed frenzy that resulted in massive record sales, new hairstyles for young men (imitating the long mop-top style of the group), and fascination with anything British. A multitude of other British groups followed the Beatles’ path to America, bringing with them also the "peacock" look, with textured vests, paisley shirts, and very wide ties. The miniskirt, soon omnipresent on young and not-so-young women, also was a British export, principally the work of British designer Mary Quant. Much more would happen in fashion as in music before the end of the decade.
Not a little of what transpired in music did so at concerts, some of them folk concerts, others rock, as rock gradually assumed from folk the musical mantle of the counterculture. Among all of the 1960s concerts, Woodstock, in 1969, stood out, quickly becoming one of the defining events of the decade. Although rock became the most prominent form of music in the 1960s, folk staged a strong comeback, country spread its popularity into urban areas, soul music conveyed the dreams and pains of African Americans, pop and classical retained adherents, and jazz expressed, albeit for a smaller number of listeners than rock, perhaps the greatest degree of innovation. For future generations of Americans, the music of the 1960s would come largely to define the decade, along with the Vietnam War and political assassinations.
Not too far behind the music in popularity, though, was dance. The ultimate dance of the 1960s was the twist, popularized by Chubby Checker. A variety of other youthful dances with such strange names as the frug, the jerk, and the mashed potato attracted practitioners, not all of them young. Millions of teens learned new dances by watching their peers dance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand show, which also helped many singers reach stardom. Ballet also earned headlines during the 1960s, especially when the great Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev defected to the United States in 1961.
The counterculture steadily increased in influence and visibility. Hippies in long hair, beads, and psychedelic clothing celebrated the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967, bringing the section of the city known as Haight-Ashbury forever into the nation’s geographical consciousness. Young people experimented with communal living, free love, and alternate types of spirituality. Masses of young people turned out for antiwar demonstrations, most publicly at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago during the summer of 1968, in the aftermath of the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations. In opposition, President Nixon established his political success largely by appealing to what he labeled the "Silent Majority," those Americans, primarily older, who longed for a return to the way things had been, even as the world was inexorably changing.
The 1960s also experienced revolutions in sports. Vince Lombardi took his Packers from small-town Green Bay to the first Super Bowl, in 1967, winning sports immortality for himself and his team while helping to inaugurate the Super Bowl as an American institution. In 1961, Babe Ruth’s unbreakable single-season home run record of 60 was broken by another Yankee, Roger Maris. A young former Olympic gold medalist, Cassius Clay, won the heavyweight boxing championship from Sonny Liston in 1964. Within three years, the champion had joined the Nation of Islam, renamed himself Muhammad Ali, refused induction into the Armed Services, and for that refusal was stripped of his title and convicted of draft evasion. His refusal to serve highlighted growing opposition by African Americans to fighting for a country that appeared at home to deny them true equality.
Americans changed their travel habits during the 1960s. Cars were used more than ever, as family members had to drive to get to work and go shopping from their homes in the suburbs. More families went on extensive vacations by car on the improved highways that were replacing the old Route 66 and other suddenly antiquated roads, stopping along the way at motels and appreciating the ongoing beautification of the highways inaugurated by the Johnson administration. They had to share the highways, however, with large trucks that were hauling much of the freight that a few years before would have snaked across the land on railroads. Railroads declined in importance, especially for carrying passengers, and airplanes attracted new travelers as improved planes and greater wealth allowed more Americans to fly. The sky seemed more welcoming with the successful space flights beckoning Americans ever higher, despite a rash of skyjackings.
Throughout the 1960s, much else happened in popular culture, a great deal of it radically new. The growing medium of television, which started to broadcast in color, proved especially useful to advertisers, and advertising reciprocated with an unparalleled explosion of its creative imagination. New buildings soared skyward, seemingly denying gravity itself, as architects and engineers discovered new ways to combat wind and weight. Moviegoers enjoyed a diverse menu of films that exhibited a high level of artistry while also reflecting changing attitudes and lifestyles in the country. In the Heat of the Night, Midnight Cowboy, The Graduate, Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, and Rosemary’s Baby were only a few of the films that staked out new filmic territory in racism, sexuality, drugs, violence, and the supernatural. Television, a common guest in families’ living rooms, therefore remained more conservative. Nonetheless, some of the 1960s series, such as The Twilight Zone, The Fugitive, and Gunsmoke, earned lasting critical acclaim and an equally long life through reruns. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour were two of the most overtly 1960s shows in their irreverence and social satire.
In all of these ways and more, the 1960s changed the popular culture of the United States dramatically and permanently. The decade was a wild and heady ride, sometimes agonizingly sad, on occasion simply foolish, but seldom boring. Above all, it was a time to be young. Almost anyone who was anybody in those days was young, or so it seemed.
Use the links on the top left and top right sides of the page to find out more about the news, films, movie stars, songs, books, Broadway shows, awards, fads, fashions, sports, and other elements of pop culture in the 1960s. Or, if you’d like, continue reading from The 1960s by Edward J. Rielly.
Adapted from Edward J. Rielly, The 1960s. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), ix-xiii.