While President Johnson was simultaneously rolling out his Great Society blueprints and entering ever deeper in the conflict in Vietnam, a cultural rebellion was gathering strength in American universities. The affluence of the 1950s allowed an unprecedented number of young people to attend college in the 1960s. This growing demographic had little real-world experience, and they looked critically at a society that had provided prosperity for them and their families. Many university students and young Americans were unsettled with the cookie-cutter lifestyle and middle-class values of the generation before them and set out to make their own mark on society.

Never having lived through a major war, these youth had a jaded view of the war in Vietnam. They looked past Johnson's claims that it was a war that must be finished and saw only the increasing number of Americans who continued to lose their lives. They felt the struggle between the South Vietnamese government and the Vietcong was a civil war that the United States should have avoided. Above all, those opposed to the war protested the way it was being fought, with massive aerial bombings, use of napalm and other chemical weapons, and the killing of civilians by U.S. troops.

By the late 1960s, dissatisfaction among American youth led to a counterculture that opposed the status quo and challenged traditional norms and values. Based on conflicts like the Berkeley Free Speech fight in 1964, college students across the country began organizing "teach-ins" on the Vietnam War.

Slowly, the rebellion that began as a protest against Johnson's foreign policy grew into a rebellion against American culture as a whole. American youth lashed out at society through their language, music, and actions.

Taking a cue from the civil rights movement, young adults staged marches, sit-ins, and other demonstrations against every perceived injustice—from major political events, to the war, to a vague sense of unhappiness with their circumstances. College students especially banded together to form alliances of like-minded activists.

One such alliance was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This organization was borne at the University of Michigan by students Tom Hayden and Al Haber to protest American capitalism. In 1962, the SDS gathered 60 intellectuals together at Port Huron, Michigan, who shared Hayden's and Haber's belief that individual freedom was being unfairly limited for Americans. They created a manifesto known as the Port Huron Statement that focused on student and individual rights, economic justice, and societal reform.

The Port Huron Statement inspired action around the country. At the University of California Berkeley, students staged a sit-in to protest a decision made by that school's chancellor, Clark Kerr, prohibiting political demonstrations. Over 2,000 students participated in the sit-in, and the school's administration eventually acquiesced.

Berkeley student Mario Savio formed the Free Speech Movement in 1964 to present an organized front in future protests. He organized another sit-in to protest university politics that resulted in the arrest of hundreds of student protesters. The governor sent 600 armed policemen to detain the peaceful students, which stopped the protest but further inflamed students across the country.

It seemed that every aspect of college students' lives in the 1960s reflected the agitated atmosphere and counterculture. 1950s Rock and Roll music had begun a revolution by providing young people with an electrified sound unique to their generation. The musicians of the 1960s took that sound and added lyrics that echoed the counterculture of the time.

Within the U.S., new rock music styles were flourishing—like the psychedelic sound from San Francisco—but the greatest musical influence of the time came from across the Atlantic with the "British Invasion." Groups such as The Rolling Stones and the overwhelmingly popular Beatles expressed a mystical view of life that embraced drugs and Eastern religions as well as themes of anger, frustration, and rebelliousness that energized American youth.

Folk singers like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan used lilting, melodic tunes to encourage a natural, harmonious lifestyle. Their songs often railed against the establishment and encouraged listeners to break free of tradition.

Mind-altering drugs—primarily marijuana, but also hallucinogens such as LSD—gained unprecedented popularity during the 1960s. Radical Harvard professor Timothy Leary encouraged students to "Tune in, turn on, drop out," and many young people were happy to follow his hedonistic advice. Drugs and music were often intertwined at events like Woodstock, a three-day music festival in 1969 where hippies could listen to many of the preeminent musicians of the day and share drugs, alcohol, and sex.

In an effort to live more simple lives and escape what they felt were the moral impositions of society, some young people relocated from college dormitories and parents' homes to communes in rural locations. Most of these communes were not well conceived or cared for, and often any profits that were realized from the land were squandered. Eventually the poorly tended land could not sustain its inhabitants, and most communes disbanded. By the 1970s, most of the hippies had rejoined the society that they had "dropped out" of just a few years earlier.

Copyright 2006 The Regents of the University of California and Monterey Institute for Technology and Education