The Great Society and the Vietnam War

The Great Society and the Vietnam War

Popular culture soon reflected the movement from the city to the suburbs. Leading sitcom families in 1950s programs such as I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners were apartment dwellers, but by the 1960s, Americans gathered to watch the daily lives of suburban families in Leave it to Beaver and similar programs. While popular culture extolled the virtues of suburban life, a new generation of restless suburban youths continued to embrace counterculture modes of expression. Beneath the façade of conformity and contentedness, the youths of the early 1960s experimented with similar styles of music, literature, and drugs the beatniks had embraced in the previous decade.

Although few beatniks would have appreciated the tribute, 1960 was also the year that a British rock band called themselves The Beatles and began their meteoric rise. Offering a middle-class version of the rebellious posturing of the previous generation, The Beatles soon embodied the essence of suburban youth culture in the mid-1960s. The final years of the decade, however, featured a culture far more rebellious than the clean-cut teen idols from Liverpool. In 1969, half a million hipsters and fellow travelers converged upon a farm in upstate New York in 1969 to witness rock ‘n’ roll deliver its own proclamation of emancipation at a concert called Woodstock.