Chapter 32
Intro: “The Youth Culture”
Two impulses of youth during the ‘60s and ‘70s:
- Create a new culture based on rule by people rather than by ‘elites’ in order to end the war and bring on social/economic justice
- “Liberation” movement: the move for racial groups, women, and gays to move into mainstream society and begin demanding things from society
The New Left
- Post-war baby boomers coming of age in the 1960s-70s
- More than 8 million American youths attending college
- Few youths rebel significantly, although the ones who do rebel powerfully enough to impact the cultural and political climate substantially
- Radicalization of many youth and college students: the New Left
- New Left is a large group of (predominantly) white men and women who rose up against the polarizing political climate of their day and challenged it
- New Leftists embraced the civil rights movement, but was mostly white students
- Some New Leftists were children of the “Old Left” (from the ‘30s and ‘40s) and took many ideas from the Old Left movements; C. Wright Mills (1950s) wrote a series of scathing reports on modern bureaucracies, which influenced New Leftists
- New Leftists enjoyed the works of Karl Marx and other modern day Marxists; looked to Che Guevara (Chay Gwey-var-uh), Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong as heroes; the New Left movement diverged from the AFL-CIO over the issue of the union’s anti-communism
- The movement drew ideals from the civil rights movement; many white students first experienced social injustice in the South, led many students to question social norms and others to consider “broader political commitments”(support for blacks)
- 1962: A group of students from prestigious colleges met in Michigan to form the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the principal organization for student radicalism; Declaration of beliefs is the Port Huron Document (written mostly by student activist Tom Hayden), expressed commitment to form a new political structure and disillusionment with society
- Some SDS members move into poor neighborhoods in the inner city in order to mobilize poor/working class people politically, in general a failure
- Students at the
