United States

The 1960s were marked by the greatest changes in morals and manners since the 1920s. Young people, college students in particular, rebelled against what they viewed as the repressed conformist society of their parents. They advocated a sexual revolution, aided by the birth control pill and later by Roe v. Wade (1973), a Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion. “Recreational” drugs such as marijuana and LSD were increasingly used. Opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam promoted the rise of a New Left, which was anticapitalist as well as antiwar. The political activists of the New Left drew on the theories of political philosopher Herbert Marcuse, sociologist C. Wright Mills, and psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm, among others. A “counterculture” sprang up that legitimized radical standards of taste and behaviour in the arts as well as in life. Feminism was reborn and joined the ranks of radical causes.

Except for feminism, most organized expressions of the counterculture and the New Left, including the influential Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), did not long survive the sixties. Nevertheless, they changed American life. Recreational drug taking, previously confined largely to impoverished inner cities, became part of middle-class life. The sexual revolution reduced government censorship, changed attitudes toward traditional sexual roles, and enabled homosexuals to organize and acknowledge their identities as never before. Although there had been earlier protests by gay groups, the Stonewall riots—a series of violent confrontations between police and gay rights activists outside the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York City, in the summer of 1969—was perhaps the first time lesbians, gays, and transvestites saw the value in uniting behind a common cause. Unrestrained individualism played havoc with family values. People began marrying later and having fewer children. The divorce rate accelerated to the point that the number of divorces per year was roughly half the number of marriages. The number of abortions rose, as did the illegitimacy rate. By the 1980s one in six families was headed by a single woman, and over half of all people living in poverty, including some 12 million children, belonged to such families. Because inflation and recession made it hard to support even intact families on a single income, a majority of mothers entered the workforce. Thus, the stable family-oriented society of the 1950s became a thing of the past.

The Vietnam War

U.S. involvement in Vietnam dated to the Truman administration, when economic and military aid was provided to deter a communist takeover of French Indochina. When France withdrew and Vietnam was divided in two in 1954, the United States continued to support anticommunist forces in South Vietnam. By 1964, communist insurgents were winning their struggle against the government of South Vietnam, which a decade of American aid had failed to strengthen or reform. In August, following an allegedly unprovoked attack on U.S. warships patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin, a resolution pledging complete support for American action in Vietnam was passed unanimously in the House of Representatives and with only two dissenting votes in the Senate.

Vietnam WarU.S. paratroopers carrying a wounded soldier to an ambulance helicopter during the Vietnam War, 1965.AP Images

After the fall elections, Johnson began deploying a huge force in Vietnam (more than half a million troops in 1968, together with strong air and naval units). This power was directed not only against the Viet Cong insurgents but also against North Vietnam, which increased its efforts as American participation escalated. Despite massive U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, the communists refused to yield. On January 30, 1968, disregarding a truce called for the Tet (lunar new year) holiday, the communists launched an offensive against every major urban area in South Vietnam. Although the Tet Offensive was a military failure, it proved to be a political victory for the communists because it persuaded many Americans that the war could not be ended at a bearable price. Opposition to U.S. involvement became the major issue of the 1968 election. After Sen. Eugene McCarthy, a leading critic of the war, ran strongly against him in the New Hampshire primary, Johnson announced that he would not seek or accept renomination. He also curtailed bombing operations, opened peace talks with the North Vietnamese, and on November 1 ended the bombing of North Vietnam.