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10 POPULAR CULTUR~ AnD 1960s ~~Rm~nT During the 1960s, the United States entered a fiercely tumultuous era of social and cultural unrest. The civil rights movement became a powerful force, breaking down racial barriers and galvanizing both a larger "rights revolution" and fierce resistance. The United States and the Soviet Union faced off for thirteen terrifying days in October 1962 over missiles in Cuba, bringing the world to what President John Kennedy later described as a fifty-fifty chance of nuclear war. Assassins killed Kennedy, his brother Robert, and a number of people in the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr. Bloody urban riots launched a series of violent summers in dozens of cities. The U.S. military intervention in Vietnam deepened, fueling protests that, in turn, drew fire as un-American and unpatriotic. Representatives of a budding counterculture faced attack as "long-haired hippie freaks." Dramatic changes created both a yeasty sense of possibilities and fears that the nation was frighteningly off track. Racial conflict, campus unrest, more assassinations, and bitter social divisions over a host of issues pounded Americans. "It seems like it's been the sixties forever," moaned two writers in 1966. "We have had enough! Enough! ... Let six years be a decade." But some of the worst violence was yet to come. One person recalled going into the 1960s with a firm belief in "sports, mom and dad, apple pie. I came out of it seeing American society as rotten to the core." Another believed that the upheavals had virtually destroyed the United States: "The inmates started running the asylum."1 Caught in this social, political, and cultural maelstrom, American entertainments spun with dizzying speed. Popular culture burst with renewed creativity. At the same time, it reflected the strong pull of tradition and a desire for order. Powerful continuities competed with startling changes. PoPULAR CuLTURE AND r96os FERMENT 349 ~or some embittered Americans, then and later, the 1960s gave birth to a regrettable wave of irresponsibility and permissiveness-nothing less than cultural treason. "In the nation's politics," as the cultural analyst Thomas Frank later wrote, "sixties- and hippie-bashing remains a trump card only slightly less effective than red-baiting was in earlier times." Critics of the 1960s tended to blame groups of "unpatriotic" Americans for assaulting the nation's treasured heritage and values. Such scapegoating typically overlooked the role of one of the most hallowed of American touchstones-the market-in disrupting tradition, promoting rebellion, and encouraging the pursuit of pleasure, however forbidden. "Consumer capitalism did not demand conformity or homogeneity," according to Frank; "rather, it thrived on the doctrine of liberation and continual transgression ." Nothing less than one of the market's most potent mechanismsthe all-American institution of advertising-neatly helped prepare the way for the rule-breaking, countercultural ferment of the 1960s.2 During the 1950s, a small group of creative rebels on the margins of the advertising industry had begun to challenge the established views that promoted consensus-style conformity. "For creative people rules can be prisons," asserted Bill Bernbach, who hoped to turn the public's growing cynicism about advertising into a marketing ploy in itself. His relatively small company spurned quantitative research and broke the rules that an advertising giant such as Rosser Reeves had spelled out when he advised: "Tell 'em what ya gonna tell 'em, tell 'em, tell 'em what ya told 'em, and then do it again."3 In some brilliantly innovative ads at the end of the 1950s, for example, Bernbach conceded that Volkswagen cars were small and ugly. Here was a shocking departure from familiar advertisements that emphasized American automobiles' powerful engines, large size, and chrome-covered appeal. Bernbach's VW ads urged people to "think small" and buy a car they could drive cheaply-a kind of "anticar" or cute "love bug." In the 1960s, Bernbach continued his inventive techniques, replacing authority figures in ads with playful individuals who, for example, tried to eat their Campbell's pork and beans as they took a convertible through a car wash: "You can still taste the sauce." Starting in 1962, Bernbach's ads for the Avis rental car company did the unthinkable: admit that a company ranked second to its competitor. But, precisely because Avis needed clients to catch up, its motto was: "We try harder." Avis was initially skeptical about running the advertisements, but Bernbach prevailed, increasing the company's share of the rental car market by 28 percent within...

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