Unit 13:: The Counterculture

The Sixties were a time of intense political conflict in the United States. Young professionals entered government in the hope of bringing about reform, joined the Peace Corps to aid people in developing nations, and volunteered as community organizers in the nation’s poorest inner cities. Students put their bodies on the line in civil rights actions, staged “teach-ins” against the Vietnam War, and insisted on their right to political activism in the “free speech movement” in opposition to the academic-military-industrial complex of the “megaversity,” the University of California, Berkeley. They formed the core of a New Left that had grave concerns about the seemingly self-satisfied complacency of their parents, who valued the prosperity and national security the various administrations since Franklin D. Roosevelt (in the New Deal era) had provided.