The 1960s transformed American life in ways unimaginable when the decade began. It produced new rights and new understandings of freedom. It made possible the entrance of numerous members of racial minorities into the mainstream of American life, while leaving unsolved the problem of urban poverty. It set in motion a transformation of the status of women. It changed what Americans expected from government—from clean air and water to medical coverage in old age. At the same time, it undermined public confidence in national leaders. Relations between young and old, men and women, and white and non-white, along with every institution in society, changed as a result.
Just as the Civil War and New Deal established the framework for future political debates, so, it seemed, Americans were condemned to refight the battles of the 1960s long after the decade had ended. Race relations, feminism, social policy, the nation’s proper role in world affairs—these issues hardly originated in the 1960s. But the events of those years made them more pressing and more divisive. As the country became more conservative, the Sixties would be blamed for every imaginable social ill, from crime and drug abuse to a decline of respect for authority. Yet during the 1960s, the United States had become a more open, more tolerant—in a word, a freer—country.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What was the significance of the 1963 March on Washington?
2. In what ways were President Kennedy’s foreign policy decisions shaped by Cold War ideology?
3. Explain the significance of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
4. Explain why many blacks, especially in the North, did not believe that the civil rights legislation went far enough in promoting black freedom.
5. What were the effects of President Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty programs?
6. In what ways was the New Left not as new as it claimed?
7. What were the goals of U.S. involvement in Vietnam?
8. How did the civil rights movement influence the broader rights revolution of the 1960s?
9. Identify the origins, goals, and composition of the feminist, or women’s liberation, movement.
10. Describe how the social movements of the 1960s in the United States became part of a global movement for change by 1968.
FREEDOM QUESTIONS
1. How was the Great Society rooted in New Deal ideas of freedom?
2. Explain the concepts of freedom held by the conservative Young Americans for Freedom and the liberal Students for a Democratic Society. Why did conservatives object to the goal of “participatory democracy”?
3. What were the cultural freedoms embraced by the counterculture?
4. How did the women's liberation movement expand the idea of freedom?
