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137 “What It Is Ain’t Exactly Clear” Sixties Culture, Straight and Counter NO DECA DE I N A M ER ICA N HISTOR Y is as defined by its culture as is the 1960s. Indeed, it comes with its own soundtrack—the overwhelming majority of documentaries, movies, and television shows that deal with the decade usually begin with one of the three musical anthems of the decade: The Byrds “Turn, Turn, Turn” (Columbia, 1965: “To everything, turn, turn, turn; there is a season”); Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” (Atco, 1967: “There’s something happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear”) or the Youngblood’s “Get Together” (RCA, 1967: “Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now”). Indeed, sixties culture is still being appropriated. And not only the ubiquitous nature of rock and roll music, with the inevitable remakes of sixties hits, but virtually every area of sixties culture is still visible—in a plethora of posters, buttons, and other collectible paraphernalia; in the many bizarre commercial uses of the peace sign; in the sale of sixties knock-off fashions to teenage hippie wannabes; in the revivals of Broadway plays from the sixties (Hair has never gone away, but neither has The Sound of Music). The vast majority of survey texts on the sixties approach the culture of the decade by analyzing that part of the culture that ran against—counter to—the culture of established, or “straight” American culture. The number of chapters on the counterculture that are subtitled “Drugs, Sex, and Rock and Roll” are literally too many to count. This does an injury both to a study of the complexity of the counterculture and to the study of straight culture in the 1960s—the culture that surrounded the overwhelming majority of Americans. This chapter will attempt to redress what I have seen to be an 138 A M E R I C A I N T H E S I X T I E S imbalance in the cultural history of the period by looking at sixties culture— straight and counter. What would become known as the counterculture movement of the 1960s was, indeed, a reaction against the cultural priorities of the postwar generation. As introduced in chapter 1, the children of the Great Depression and World War II wanted as much comfort and luxury as they could afford— and in the immediate postwar period, they could afford quite a bit. This gave rise to what economist John Kenneth Galbraith christened “the affluent society.” The white, affluent youth of the 1960s often derisively referred to this culture of their parents as the “straight culture.” Despite tales told earlier in this book of the young activists in the South and on college campuses, most young Americans ignored the protests of their brethren (they would later say, many with a smile, that “the sixties passed me by”). Indeed, the vast majority of baby boomers had grown to appreciate the advantages of being affluent. They neither “tuned in, turned on, nor dropped out”—they stayed in college, avoided the drug culture, and, following college, got white-collar jobs. These choices allowed them to enjoy the television, automobiles, suburban life, alcohol, and security that their parents had enjoyed. Parenthetically, as noted in the previous chapter, taking this path allowed them to use the various legal means at their disposal to avoid military service in Vietnam. Of course, not all Americans were affluent, nor were all Americans white. For most Americans of color, their cultural imperatives would not, in the 1960s, include a life of even casual luxury. We have, at various places in this book, seen evidence of the hard life led by most African, Chicano, and Native Americans—urban and rural—that was in deep contrast to the life of most white baby boomers. The history of an era’s popular culture is often a story of the lives of those who have leisure time and how they choose to spend that time. Many Americans of color looked at the “white kids” and repressed a smile—here were kids who had it all, who would never know the life of a sharecropper, life on a reservation, or in a barrio or ghetto, talking about how they “did not trust anyone over thirty,” “leaving” their life of luxury to try their hand at being young social workers, or to live life in a commune—if it...

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