The Rise of Ideologically Driven “Boomers” Who Comprised a Colossal Part of the 1960s Protest Movements in the United States: They Changed America Forever!

1. Immediately after World War II ended, there was prosperity that was driven partly by the heavy militarization of the American economy during the war and after. American corporation spread their wings globally in search of avenues for profitable investment.
2. The McCarthyism of the 1950s tamed and intimidated organized labor and ushered in the era of collaboration between “Big Business” and labor. In any case workers were also cashing in on the new American prosperity. Families bought houses in booming suburban communities, shopped in huge shopping centers and grocery chains, and drove around in big automobiles with V8 engines, sent their children to racially segregated suburban schools, etc.

But All Was Not Well in America

1. New books were published by scholars with a critical eye regarding what was going on! The publication of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” dropped a bombshell highlighting the stark contradiction of “affluence” and widespread poverty in American.
2. African American Civil Rights movements dramatized the pervasiveness of racism and its manifestations in the labor market, housing market, public amenities, etc.
3. Global anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism struggles sprouted all over the world, as the US and NATO countries were pitted against the Socialist block of countries spearheaded by the Soviet Union. The potential for a nuclear war was averted by a peculiar doctrine of “peaceful coexistence” dubbed “MAD”—Mutually Assured Destruction.

From the Internet

October 16, 1962

For thirteen days in October 1962 the world waited—seemingly on the brink of nuclear war—and hoped for a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba.

America Under Siege by Student Movements

1. University and college students from New York to California mounted protests of all kinds: the war in Vietnam, racism and segregation in American society, rotten segregated non-white communities in what became known and the “inner city” occasioned by the flight of whites to the suburbs!
2. There was an escalation of culture wars as the “right wing of white political movements chanted “America love it or leave it! On the side of “left leaning” movements were groups such as the Black Panther Party, Yipies, etc
3. There were feminist movements that challenged the traditional roles of women in the family, labor market and the public sphere.

Popular music became a powerful instrument of youth radicalization across the US and the world at large.