Several events in particular galvanized the Hippie generation against governmental authority in the 1960s, including the response of various Southern state governments to the growing Civil Rights movement, especially after the disappearance and murder of Civil Rights activists from the Northeast and the use of state troops to resist Supreme Court decisions on the matter of school desegregation. However, perhaps no political goal was more important to the Hippie generation than the opposition to the war in Vietnam and the compulsory draft system of all males of military age.
The Hippie movement embraced the anti-war and anti-draft cause, rallying in mass draft card burning demonstrations in Washington and in protest marches on college campuses throughout much of the country. Tragic events like the death of four college students shot by National Guard troops on the campus of Kent State University only reaffirmed the commitment to the cause against the war and the draft.
Music also played a major role in the anti-war movement with popular artists contributing to the cause with lyrics advocating opposition to governmental authority and to war in general, and to American participation in the war in Vietnam, in particular.
Several very high-profile mass gatherings, such as at Woodstock in upstate New York and at Altamont near San Francisco hosted hundreds of thousands of Hippies and featured the most popular musical talent of the era. Countless smaller venues hosted similar free get-togethers and "love ins" across the country, promoting the same political agenda against the government and the war.
Whereas peace and love characterized the dominant attitude of the Hippie counterculture, several more radical components advocated more aggressive tactics against the main-stream cultural institutions. The so-called "Chicago Seven" disrupted the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago along with an eighth member, Bobby Seale of the much more radical and less pacifist Black Panthers who were not opposed to violent governmental opposition. Another member of the Chicago Seven, Abby
Hoffman, promoted various forms of non-violent but criminal acts of anarchy that he detailed in his book, entitled Steal This Book (1971), in which he provided instructions on everything from eating cheaply and living freely to hitching free rides illegally on public transportation, circumventing...
Furthermore, the Supreme Court (and the Texas district court also) relied on a judicial invention introduced in the earlier Griswold and Eisenstadt decisions: namely, the penumbra of privacy that was said to "emanate" from the Fourteenth Amendment to give rise in a fundamental right of privacy despite the fact that the notion of personal privacy is not mentioned at all in the Constitution. Certainly, the Roe decision was justified on
American Graffiti and "Easy Rider" Although, both "American Graffiti" and "Easy Rider" are set in the 1960's, the young people each film reflects are very different. This is due to the fact that perhaps no other decade in the twentieth century changed so much from its beginning until the end than the 1960's. When the 1960's began, men wore crew cut hairstyles, slacks with casual shirts, usually plaid, and buttoned down the
psychedelics on American music and culture The evolution of American popular music and culture in the late1960's and 1970's was an influential factor in the inspiration of musical artists. The creativity of music and its variety in modernity indicates that, most American artists claim for music ranges from the religious beliefs to the love interests. However, the driving force of creativity for the music in United States has come as
To paraphrase something T.S. Eliot said about literary classics, we know more than we did in the sixties -- and the sixties are most of what we know. Taking the good with the bad then became the beginning of the end of an era of excess that began like so many other ideas with good intentions and led to a wayward and destructive social and cultural path. Some took from
Cold War dominated American culture, consciousness, politics and policy for most of the 20th century. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which symbolized the fall of the Iron Curtain and therefore finale of the Cold War, Cold War rhetoric and politics continued especially in the War on Terror. Depictions of the Cold War in American literature and film parallel the changes that took place in American ways
Drug use patterns changed from soft and psychedelic drugs like cannabis and mushrooms to harder drugs like barbiturate pills and heroin. The focus on the hippie movement also dissolved. What started as a relatively cohesive challenge to commercialism and corruption ended up being a fragmented array of debauch. The death of celebrity musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Janice Joplin triggered the end of the hippie heyday. In spite of
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