Nation of Nations Concise 2/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff
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Great movements have smaller, often painfully human dimensions, as the introduction to this chapter shows. Six-year-old Ruby displayed one kind of courage; an Atlanta school teacher showed quite another. Both made essential contributions to a dream too long deferred; both illustrated the reality of adjusting to rapid change.

A Liberal Agenda for Reform

The roots of social upheaval in the 1960s lay beneath the calm surface of the 1950s. John F. Kennedy opened the new era with his call for conquering "new frontiers." A Catholic, he laid to rest the religious issue, bested Richard Nixon in televised debates, and won the election by an unprecedentedly narrow margin.

Kennedy was not instinctively a liberal. Still, he brought to the White House a crew of pragmatic liberals convinced they could use the power of government to bring about positive change. Wielding power meant a more dynamic policy of "flexible" response to contain Communism abroad. Specifically, the new administration turned its attention to the instabilities of the Third World, hoping to promote development and programs like the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and "special forces" military advisers. Almost immediately the aborted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs raised doubts about Kennedy's judgment. So, too, did his confrontation with Khrushchev in Vienna and the Soviet decision to build a wall in Berlin. Kennedy countered by stepping up aid to South Vietnam. And when intelligence sources discovered in October 1962 that the Soviets had placed offensive missiles in Cuba, the President faced the worst crisis of the nuclear age. Choosing a mix of firmness and restraint, he rejected air strikes in favor of a blockade. Privately he offered Soviet Premier Khrushchev a face-saving way out of the crisis. The next year Kennedy negotiated a nuclear test ban treaty, which eased slightly the heated-up cold war.

At home Kennedy and his advisors faced a balky Congress controlled by conservative Democrats. They tried to apply the ideas of John Maynard Keynes to increase economic growth without inflation. But they could not overcome the mistrust of the business community. A more influential agency for reform in the early 1960s was the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, which handed down critical decisions on civil liberties and (most far-reaching) voting rights.

The Civil Rights Crusade

Civil rights proved to be the crucial test of liberalism. As the push for desegregation shifted from the courts to more direct action, Kennedy only reluctantly took up the cause which threatened to split the Democratic Party. Leadership came instead from black political and religious organizations such as the Congress on Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Committee. Sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and other forms of nonviolent protest became the weapons to fight segregation. The sometimes brutal reactions of southern police and white supremacists shocked national television audiences and especially Kennedy's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. On several occasions the younger Kennedy ordered federal marshals to protect civil rights groups. The President proposed a major civil rights bill. On August 28, 1963, over 200,000 people gathered in Washington to hear Martin Luther King speak of his dreams for integration.

Kennedy had committed himself to a civil rights bill, but he was assassinated in Dallas. Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner, honored Kennedy's commitment by pushing through a broad Civil Rights Act in 1964 and a Voting Rights Act in 1965. But even those advances could not quiet the increasingly militant and radical demands of black nationalist groups like SNCC, the Black Muslims, and the Black Panthers. Meanwhile, in the North, civil rights leaders discovered de facto barriers to integration far more difficult to remove than the "Jim Crow" laws in the South. Beginning in the summer of 1964, a series of race riots tore through the nation's cities.

Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society

As President, Lyndon Johnson was determined to leave an enduring mark on the nation. Not only did he commit himself to civil rights and liberal tax cuts, but also to aid to education, health benefits for the elderly and poor, job training, housing, urban renewal, the environment, and more. He called his program "The Great Society" and with it surpassed the New Deal's legislative outpouring. In beating conservative Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race, Johnson also bested Roosevelt's landslide victory in 1936.

Johnson's vision proved heady indeed. Yet many of the initiatives had a higher price tag than he or his supporters imagined. Inefficiency, corruption, soaring costs, and political infighting dogged many Great Society programs.

The Counterculture

Many young Americans, in the midst of this blizzard of social programs, were giving up on traditional politics and social conventions. One group of political activists called themselves Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). These young radicals distinguished their brand of politics from the Marxists of the 1930s by describing themselves as the New Left. A battle over free speech at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 brought radical student movements wide national exposure.

Other youth forsook politics in favor of non-materialistic lifestyles, experimenting with sex, drugs, and music in search of altered consciousness. In their outrageous clothes and personal style they flouted convention. Much of the style of the "counterculture" came from West Coast "hippies." Drugs played a central role in defining hippie styles. So, too, did the folk music of Bob Dylan and rock music revitalized by the Beatles and other English groups. By the late 1960s, youthful hopes of building a better world, whether through a Great Society, radical politics, or cultural revolution, began to collapse. The era's soaring dreams were brought to earth under the weight of an invasive commercialism, the lack of coherence within the movements, growing violence, and, above all, the impact of the war in Vietnam.

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