Download - The 1960’s
Plans: New Frontier
• Education• Medical Care for
the Elderly• Urban Renewal• Tax Cuts• End Racial
Discrimination
Failures• Most not passed
due to resistance in Congress
• After his death Johnson is able to pass many of JFK’s programs
Space Race• Americans were behind in the Space Race
• Kennedy promoted $24 billion project to land Americans on the moon
• 1969, Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon
• Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong
B. LBJ Takes Over
The Assassination of a President
• Nov 22, 1963
• Kennedy is shot and killed
• Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested
Warren Commission
• Commission led by Earl Warren that investigated JFK’s assassination
• Concluded that Oswald was a lone gunman
The New President• Pledged to
continue Kennedy’s policies
• Got Kennedy’s Civil Rights bill (Civil Rights Act of 1964) and tax cut bill passed
• One of the few Southern Democrats in favor of Civil Rights
Nominees• Barry Goldwater
(Rep)• Wanted to abolish
social welfare programs and use Nukes in Vietnam
• Lyndon Johnson (Dem)
• Promised a Great Society and would not cause Nuclear War
Campaign• Daisy Ad campaign highlights the
belief that electing Goldwater would mean nuclear war
• Goldwater not popular with moderate Republicans
The Results• Johnson wins by a landslide
The War on Poverty• 40-50 million
Americans were considered poor
• Attributed to loss of unskilled jobs
• Office of Economic Opportunity (1964)– Job Training– Legal Services– Scholarships
Head Start (1965)• Pre-school
program• Help
disadvantaged children prepare for school
• Programs also passed to aid elementary and secondary schools
Medicare Act of 1965• Health insurance for the elderly• Medicade – health insurance for the
low income
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
• Provided low-income housing• $2.9 billion to urban renewal
Immigration Act of 1965
• Undid National Origins Act of 1924• 1st come, 1st served• Precedence given to:
– Family ties– Skills necessary for the U.S.– Political Refugees
• Did set limits– 120,000 from Western Hemisphere– 170,000 from Eastern Hemisphere
Impact of Immigration Act
• Opened the floodgates– Latin America (esp Mexico)– Asia (Southeast Asia)– Caribbean
• Sunbelt mostimpacted
• Increase in illegal immigrationbegan
Johnson’s Legacy
• Achievements compared to FDR’s New Deal
• Poverty reduced from 22% to 13%
• Great Society overshadowed and under-funded because of Vietnam War
Nominees• Richard Nixon
(Rep)• Promised to restore
law and order
• Hubert Humphrey (Dem)
• Represented all of the problems of the country
Impact of Baby Boomers
• ↑ affluent youth + ↑ jobs requiring post-high school skills = ↑ college students
• 1950 - 1 million college students
• 1968 – 7 million college students
• Exposure to ideas that challenged traditional views
New Left• Influenced by the Beats of the 1950’s• Liberal political movement of the 1960’s• Wanted a participatory democracy,
critiqued Am. values, and anti-conformity
• Opposed “The Establishment” • Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
epitomized this movement– Anti-war– Pro-Civil Rights– Free Speech
Counterculture
• Grew out of the New Left• Was a way of life rather than just a
political movement• Wanted a lifestyle of drug use, free
love, and a rejection of adult authority
• Hippies becames the most known counterculture movement
• Fought for racial equality, women's rights, sexual liberation, relaxation of prohibitions against recreational drugs, and an end to the Vietnam War
• Hippie culture was best embodied by the new genre of psychedelic rock music
• The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Janis Joplin.
Sexual Revolution
• Challenged traditional values of pre-marital sex as taboo
• Encouraged by mass marketing of birth control
• “Free Love” – separating sex from procreation
• Became part of the youth rebellion
Women’s Rights
• Eleanor Roosevelt began to highlight the inequalities women faced
• Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique (1963) explored how unfulfilling women found being housewives
• The middle class suburban dream had become a nightmare
• Began the Feminist Movement
“The suburban home is a comfortable concentration camp”