Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up

by Victor D. Brooks

  Although Head Start was the most rapidly implemented aspect of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Boomer children and their parents quickly noticed other changes in their school experience. Elementary schools that had never operated a library now had funding to hire a school librarian who offered reading awareness programs and ordered substantial numbers of books and related materials under increasingly generous budgets. School counselors, previously limited largely to secondary school vocational interests and college admissions duties, now became involved in more extensive aspects of student life down to the lowest grade levels. University graduate admissions programs found themselves scrambling to find faculty who could instruct future guidance counselors as their numbers seemed to grow geometrically.

  One of the most important elements of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was major educational funding. The president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, reads to a classroom for Project Head Start, one of the longest-lasting and most influential programs of the Johnson presidency. (Lyndon Baines Johnson Library)

  The companion Higher Education Act was designed to help colleges cope with the surge of students that had reached six million at the passage of the act and would climb to ten million before current high school freshmen reached their senior year of college. Johnson administration policymakers were particularly concerned that while 78 percent of high school graduates with a family income over $12,000 now entered college, only 33 percent of those with family income under $3,000 did so. An average mid-sixties family with an income of $6,000 could expect a tuition bill of about $1,500 at a public university and $2,300 at a private college, guaranteeing that only a mortgage payment would produce a larger drain on family income. Great Society legislation now allowed any full-time student to borrow $1,500 a year with no payments until a year after graduation, while Title IV of the Higher Education Act provided an initial $70 million a year in grants of $1,000 to $1,500 a year to lower-income students, coupled with an additional $200 million a year in work-study funds to meet gaps between grants and actual expenses.

  The unanimous Senate vote for the Higher Education Act reflected the realization that American higher education was becoming a major element in the ongoing cold-war struggle against the Soviet Union and China, and that virtually every state in the Union could benefit from a massive infusion of federal funds for colleges. Beyond the reality that federal funds would now pay a substantial portion of student tuition, the act also provided both private and public institutions with generous subsidies. For example, Title I budgeted $50 million a year to colleges to study solutions to local community problems; Title II budgeted the same amount for expanding college library acquisitions as well as an additional $415 million to train librarians; Title III offered $55 million a year for teaching fellowships for graduate students and junior faculty to acquire doctorates and gain full faculty status; Title VI provided $275 million a year to the National Teacher Corps to train teachers for low-income school districts; Title VII disbursed $190 million annually to build campus science, mathematics, foreign-language, and engineering facilities.

  The enactment of more than sixty laws aiding education could sometimes prove to be a mixed blessing for schools and colleges, where administrators had to cope with an often bewildering mountain of federal regulations and forms. But for most Boomers the Great Society provided enormous benefits, from access to far more books in elementary school libraries to better high school counseling facilities to an opportunity to enter college, even if family income could not support the venture.

  Beyond the educational arena, by the mid-sixties the influence of British youth culture on the Boomer generation extended well beyond the initial attraction of the Beatles. At the same time the emergence of color television, cable, and Ultra High Frequency broadcasting dramatically expanded home entertainment horizons, and the rise of James Bond and other related spy films offered Boomers a sophisticated, scary, yet entertaining view of the cold war that so dominated their lives.

  The first hint of the distinctiveness of the mid-sixties youth culture came when Boomers surged into theaters to watch a low-budget British black-and-white movie that featured only the sketchiest of plots. A Hard Day’s Night was essentially a platform for a compilation of new Beatles songs, interspersed with sight gags and a dialogue with such heavy British accents that subtitles would not have been out of place. Watching John, Paul, George, and Ringo romp and sing, millions of young people convinced themselves—and adult America—that the Beatles were not fads that would go the way of Davy Crockett caps and Hula Hoops but represented a freshness and humor that would require mainstream society to sit up and take notice.

  The television networks quickly got the message that young people now wanted their music to be more than a listening experience. ABC dropped its exuberant, high-rated folk-song program Hootenanny for the even more exuberant rock program Shindig. NBC followed suit with its own presentation of Hullaballoo. Both of these programs featured lithesome, white-booted “go-go” dancers, a live audience of screaming kids, and segments “direct from London” with groups and singers who hoped to make their own transatlantic leap to fame like the Beatles.

  Largely due to heavy television promotion and extensive airplay, the Beatles found their monopoly on American attention very short-lived. Although many cynical adults claimed that virtually all of the “British Invasion” acts looked alike and sang alike, each act had a distinctive persona and became a favorite of particular groups of American youngsters. It was soon apparent that the chief threat to the Beatles’ supremacy would be the London-based Rolling Stones, whose leaders, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, presented a grittier, blues-oriented sound and edgier appearance than their Liverpool counterparts. As the Beatles gradually shifted from concert performers and movie stars to a studio experience, the Rolling Stones emerged as the long-term kings of the live performance well into the twenty-first century.

  Yet the niches extended far beyond Liverpool versus London. The Kinks featured a driving guitar beat and socially satiric songs that spoke of the frequent boredom of suburban youth on both sides of the Atlantic. The Moody Blues experimented with a fusion of pop-rock and classical. Herman’s Hermits featured incredibly youthful-looking teen singer Peter Noone and lighthearted songs that mesmerized younger audiences while offering American adults a hint of the traditional British music hall experience with hits like “I’m Henry the Eighth.” Dusty Springfield used her rather exotic makeup and short skirts to invite American teenage girls into a sophisticated world of romance.

  By the close of 1965 American kids could listen to British groups with American names, such as the Dakotas, the Nashville Teens, and the Swinging Blue Jeans; experience the sounds of vaguely scary acts such as the Zombies, the Mindbenders, and the Animals; and even begin to distinguish between the Liverpool accents of Gerry and the Pacemakers and the London accents of the Dave Clark Five. British terms such as “fab” began to replace the American equivalent “boss,” and the “mod” fashions of London’s Carnaby Street edged into American department stores. As boys’ crew cuts gave way to more moppish hairstyles and girls dabbled with the heavy eye makeup and shorter skirts of British “birds,” the first hints of a new generation gap emerged between parents and children. Soon these points of contention would seem trivial in comparison to the confrontations of the last years of the decade.

  The songs and fashions of the “British Invasion” may have given younger Americans a more sophisticated view of an increasingly international youth culture, but the emergence of a new British film genre hinted that the cold war might be far more complex than they had been taught. In 1963 United Artists released Dr. No, the first film version of the British writer Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, which were particular favorites of President Kennedy. The initial film and its sequel, From Russia with Love, were solid if not spectacular hits, but in 1964 the even faster action and gadgetry of Goldfinger hit the screen in the wake of Beatlemania. Its characters, such as the
Korean butler-assassin Odd Job and the female villain-turned-heroine Pussy Galore, suddenly became household names while the largely implied rather than explicit sexual content persuaded more than a few parents tacitly to allow their children to see the film. Goldfinger and its two immediate successors, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice, exposed American young people to a conflict that questioned some of the political realities of both their parents’ World War II and the current cold war. In these films, for example, the Soviet Union and its government are virtually never the nemesis to Western security or world peace. At times Russia is depicted as an implicit ally of the West against the far more evil forces of the mysterious renegade organization Spectre, which successively attempts to set off an atomic bomb in Fort Knox, launch a nuclear attack on Miami, and initiate World War III by forcing America and Russia into a confrontation that neither side really wants. In You Only Live Twice, the Japanese enemy of only two decades earlier is now depicted as a staunch ally of the West with noble, English-speaking officials commanding fearsome but heroic troops. Each of these films offered the intriguing possibility of a future American-Soviet alliance, with a hint that the cold war was far less pervasive or permanent than children had learned in school.

  The huge success of the Bond series quickly influenced the television programs that young viewers found attractive. One of the most popular Bond spinoffs was NBC’s Man from U.N.C.L.E., which pitted a UN-like force of agents against a criminal outlaw conspiracy called Thrush. The two top U.N.C.L.E. agents are an American and a citizen of Soviet Georgia, played by David McCallum, who became the more popular character to young viewers. The spy mania of the mid-sixties also induced NBC to launch the groundbreaking I Spy, which paired a white agent, played by Robert Culp, and an African-American operative, played by Bill Cosby, in a series of global adventures largely filmed on location. Cosby became the first black star of a prime-time dramatic series, and the humorous yet socially equal bonding between the two characters became a hopeful sign of changing racial attitudes.

  Aside from the action and adventure of numerous spy series, a combination of fantasy, comedy-horror, and science fiction became the subject of numerous cafeteria and after-school conversations. A quintet of comedies featuring comic relations between witches, aliens, genies, and more normal humans attracted even the youngest children. The Addams Family, The Munsters, Bewitched, My Favorite Martian, and I Dream of Jeannie took lighthearted and occasionally satiric views of situations that in earlier eras had produced terror. Samantha Stevens turned the witch as hag into a glamorous, caring housewife while Tim O’Hara’s Martian “Uncle Martin” turned the alien invader persona into a social-life counselor with extraordinary but often comic powers.

  The more serious side of this genre emerged with the premiere of Star Trek in September 1966, and offered young viewers the tantalizing prospect of an interracial, even interspecies, crew and a basically optimistic view of the world that Boomer descendants would inherit. Most of the crew of the USS Enterprise seemed only slightly older than the Boomer viewers, and the plots frequently pitted the impetuous, youthful energy of Captain Kirk against the calm, logical wisdom of Mr. Spock, producing different yet complementary role models. Even young children thrilling to the threats posed by a Salt Creature or Klingon could not help but gain a sense that living in a rapidly changing yet essentially tolerant society was not an unfavorable experience for their own future.

  The music, film, and television of the mid-sixties each, in their own way, contributed to a youth culture that challenged Boomers to believe change was good and at least some of the realities of the early postwar world might be challenged. The Great Society offered affluence, increasing educational opportunity, and hope for a more equitable society as Boomers approached adulthood. Yet the Johnson administration’s policies in Southeast Asia, the increasingly impersonal and overcrowded atmosphere of the American higher education system, and an emerging generational confrontation over the definition of acceptable personal behavior were all encouraging a fortunate young generation to question the system its elders had constructed.

  9

  CHALLENGING THE ESTABLISHMENT

  ONLY DAYS before the United States entered the decade that was to be the Soaring Sixties, Clark Kerr, president of the burgeoning University of California, appraised the students who would be attending college over the next decade: “The employers will love them. They aren’t going to press many grievances. They are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be any riots.” Three thousand miles to the east, as Kerr offered his prediction, four of these “easy to handle” students were preparing the opening shot of the sixties confrontation between students and the American establishment. Ezell Blair, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond were freshmen at North Carolina A&T, an all-black college in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were attending school in a community with relatively good educational facilities for minority pupils and were welcome to spend their money in the city’s large Woolworth’s department store. But while white customers could relax from their shopping by enjoying a snack or meal at the store’s lunch counter, this foursome and other members of their race were excluded from that service. On February 1, 1960, the students left campus, headed downtown, sat down at the counter, and ordered coffee. As an astonished policeman paced behind them with no clue how to react, a few white customers cursed the students while others simply shrugged and continued shopping. A few white women even encouraged them, though the students returned to campus without their coffee. Back at school, everyone from the college dean to the student body treated them as heroes. The president of the college asked them why they had even wanted service at a counter with a reputation for tasteless food. The next day more than a dozen classmates joined them at the counter; two days later the first white student participated in the great lunch-counter sit-in while the protest idea spread outward to Durham and Winston-Salem. By Valentine’s Day college students in communities from Florida to Tennessee were crowding segregated department store lunch counters amid growing national media attention.

  One of the largest and best-organized lunch-counter sitins emerged in Nashville and included Fisk University student and later civil rights leader and legislator John Lewis. As Lewis noted, “We had on that first day over five hundred students in front of Fisk University chapel to be transported downtown to the First Baptist Church, to be organized into small groups to go down to sit in at the lunch counters.

  “We went into the five-and-tens, Woolworth’s, Kresge’s, and McClellan’s, because these stores were known all across the South and for the most part all across the country. We took our seats in a very orderly, peaceful fashion. The students were dressed like they were on their way to church or going to a big social affair. They had their books, and we stayed there at the lunch counter, studying and preparing our homework, because we were denied service. The managers ordered that the lunch counters be closed, that the restaurants be closed, and we’d just sit there, all day long.”

  Only a few weeks after the beginning of the 1960s, students at North Carolina A&T sat in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and demonstrated the impact of nonviolent protest against the Establishment. (Jack Moebes/CORBIS)

  By mid-April seventy-eight cities in Southern and border states had become part of the sit-in movement. Fifty thousand black students and white sympathizers had participated, enduring anything from sheer boredom to vicious attacks by largely young, white townspeople. Two thousand protesters, including Lewis, were arrested as Northern counterparts threw up picket lines around stores operated by chains that were discriminating in the South. Then, as protesters confronted Nashville mayor Ben West on the steps of city hall, he admitted that discrimination at lunch counters was wrong, and six Nashville counters began serving minority customers in response.

  Those first sit-ins of the sixties were organized chiefly by college students who were among the older siblings of the postwar generation. But Boomers would soon be in
volved in the civil rights movement, and a few of them would not even live to see college. The success of the lunch-counter sit-ins encouraged Martin Luther King to utilize nonviolent protest to end the segregation of public facilities in those parts of the Deep South where the lunch-counter campaign had made little or no impact. In 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, became the battleground in a Children’s Crusade pitting Public Safety Director Eugene “Bull” Connor, and his attack dogs and fire hoses, against Boomer teens and children as young as six.

  Birmingham in 1963 was one of the most segregated cities in America with “Colored” signs over water fountains, no black police or firefighters, and a chief of public safety who had already orchestrated brutal attacks on so-called Freedom Riders attempting to integrate transportation facilities. Early in the year the jails were filling with adult demonstrators, including Dr. King, in a community that was running out of money to pay their bail. Reverend James Bevel, a veteran of the Nashville sit-ins, suggested massing huge numbers of high school students who could put pressure on the city with less of an economic threat to families if they were arrested as their parents would still be on the job. As Bevel noted, “We started organizing the prom queens of the high school, the basketball stars, the football stars, to get the influence and power leaders involved. They, in turn, got all the other students involved. The students had a community they’d been in since elementary school, so they had bonded quite well. So if one would go to jail, that had a direct effect upon another because they were classmates.”

  While civil rights demonstrations were planned as peaceful protests, official response was often violent. Television images of vicious dogs attacking protesters, including children, greatly increased white sympathy for civil rights goals. (Library of Congress)