I was born near the tail end of the baby boom generation. My dad worked in a factory and my mother stayed home. We were quite poor but I didn’t know it because I always felt secure. My childhood was spent in Southern California in a house surrounded by fields and orange groves.

  My parents were young and my dad had a record player that I was fascinated with. It had a huge turntable covered in felt and it was built into a case that had a lid and could be latched. That record player had a wonderful, unique smell that I will always remember. It looked something like this:

  He had a stack of vinyl 45 records that were so exciting. Mostly Elvis Presley, but I also remember Bob Luman, Bobby Darin, Ferlin Husky, Johnny Cash and Jimmy Rogers. Since a 45 had a big hole in the middle, it was necessary to keep a supply of spindle adaptors. Without it, the record wouldn’t stay centered on the turntable.

  We had a black and white television and TV was free, although programming was pretty limited. There were no video games or internet. Our telephone was a corded rotary dial type and we had only one for the whole house. It was ok though because back then, kids spent a lot of time outdoors and parents didn’t worry much about kidnappings and such. We climbed trees, played kickball, and ate oranges and walnuts all day long from the trees around the neighborhood.

  Sodas were sold in tall glass bottles back then which could be taken, when empty, back to the store and exchanged for money. My sister and I would collect them and when we had enough, we would redeem them for penny candy. We could easily come away with a good sized bag full of a variety of candy and gum. Later I would pay at the dentist’s office.

  In 1964, the Beatles landed in America and although I was only 5 years old, I fell in love with them. There were plenty of cartoons on TV, but my favorite shows were Shindig, Hullabaloo and Bandstand. These were all musical variety shows that featured the popular stars of the day and teenagers dancing.

  The fashions of the time were nearly as exciting as the music. The girls were wearing go go boots, bell bottoms and mini skirts, while the boys were sporting long hair and clothes with paisley prints and stripes.

  Popular toys were Tonka trucks and Barbie dolls. I wanted a Barbie but I got Midge instead. She didn’t seem as glamorous as Barbie.

  Other toys that were heavily advertised were the Slinky, which is still sold today, Wheelo and Gaylord the Bassett Hound. I owned Gaylord and I seem to remember he required a lot of batteries, so when his power ran out, that was the end of playing with him. By pulling on his leash, he would be triggered to walk, with a lot of motor and gear noise I might add.

Gaylord        Wheelo

  I’m very happy I was born a baby boomer and I would not trade it for anything else. Things were far from perfect but it was a good time to grow up. Much progress has been made since then in science, medicine, civil rights, technology and general knowledge as it should be, but I will always feel nostalgic for the simpler life of the sixties.

Or

Even Honor Students Play Hooky

Truant Billy Hawkins enters the Roxy Theatre

at Ninth and Chester.

Dilapidated walls host tattered, washed-out posters

of famous strippers:

Gypsy Rose, Irma the Body, and local legend Babes Busty.

Memories of a lost art.

Billy trips on the red, torn carpet

surrounding spring-broken seats of four decades.

The minimum-wage orchestra strikes off-key accompaniment

for aging, jeered-at comics.

A snoring drunk drops his bottle,

wine trickling down rows.

As the announcer barks out a corny introduction,

disappointed Billy rises for a premature exit.

Quickly reseated by the stage-left entrance

of Buxom Brenda Bottoms,

notorious for mesmerizing cleavage;

power to corrupt even the purest of teenage boys.

After 1967, all men between the ages of 18 and 26 were required to register for the draft. Resistance to the draft became a huge part of the Anti-War Movement. Many left the US to live in a neutral country, while others resisted by tearing up their draft cards. The Catonville Nine were a group of pacifists who protested the draft by pouring blood all over draft files. These forms of resistance were good because they were nonviolent, but they did not stop the draft from happening; soldiers were still sent to war, sometimes against their will.

Eventually, many people believed that the draft took the poor and lower-class kids who could not go to college, and they changed the draft. So they began using a random system based upon birth date to pick people for the draft. Thankfully, the draft was completely done-away with (until 1980) in 1973.  

The Vietnam War Anti-War Movement gained a lot of support from black Americans. They still lived in a country full of racism, and believed that the war in Vietnam was taking attention, resources and energy away from the fight against racism in the US. So, the blacks were anti-war. Cassius Clay, known by most as Muhammad Ali, was one of the African Americans who refused to join the draft. In the Chicano Moratorium, a group of 10,000 Chicanos marched in protest of the war and racism. Three men were killed on the march by police officers.

When Nixon called for the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, one third of all colleges in the Unites States were shut down because of protests. Not only were soldiers dying overseas, but college students were being killed in violent protests.

The Anti-War Movement spread to soldiers at war, and the veterans. In 1967, the Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW) was formed. They wanted to war to end. The VVAW eventually had tens of thousands of members. They took part in many protests, and even threw their medals from the war at the Capital building in Washington, DC.  I think it was probably more effective for the actual soldiers and veterans to protest the war than anyone else.

In 1969, protesters knew that they needed to stop the war as soon as possible. Members of the SDS decided to start an urban guerilla war. They went as far as to plant bombs in the Pentagon and the Capital building. Another small group of protesters stole a plane and dropped a bomb, then put a bomb in a truck. There were probably thousands of attacks by protesters. The largest of the demonstrations was still to come.

After President Nixon ordered the invasion of Laos in 1971, over 500,000 people protested the war in Washington, DC while another 200,000 protested in San Francisco. A short time later, 50,000 people protested the war in DC again. Instead of backing down in response to the protests, Nixon decided to begin mining a harbor in Vietnam, which caused even more riots and protests. By Nixon’s inaugural day, he had angered thousands of Americans who took to the streets in protest in DC and attended the Counter-Inaugural.

If I had lived during the Sixties, I definitely would have gotten involved in an anti-war protest of some sort. I do not think that violence is the best way to get things done, so I definitely would have been demonstrating in a non-violent way. I do not think it was even necessary for the United States to get involved with Vietnam in the first place, and I think that the government would have continued making mistakes in Vietnam and taking the lives of innocent American soldiers if there had not been so much protest in the US. 

            A multitude of events took place during the nineteen-sixties. Not only was it a time of social revolution, but it was also an era of great political advancement, ground-breaking science discoveries, and border-line wars. One such scientific advancement was in 1961, when Russians launched the first man into space. During this year, the genetic DNA code was broken, and John F. Kennedy was elected president of The United States of America and established the Peace Corps. In 1962, a nuclear war was on edge due to the Cuban missile crisis, which could have killed many thousands of people and possibly could have started a worldwide war. In 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated during a parade in Texas. Although the assassin was supposedly Lee Harvey Oswald, Oswald was assassinated two days later by a suspicious plot thought to have been run by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner. By this time, two-thirds of the automobiles in the world were located in the U.S.  “Equal pay for equal work” was justified for women, and ZIP codes were introduced to the states. The years 1964 through 1967 were years of multimedia increase as well as the Vietnam War effort. Over 400,000 troops were positioned in Vietnam. In 1968, Robert Nixon was elected president, and both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. In 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, being the first person to step foot on it in history.

            A huge event in the 60’s was the Cold War. Soviet premier Joseph Stalin and U.S. president Harry Truman had opposed views, and therefore could not work together in the postwar effort of World War II. Stalin wanted Germany to become a pro-Soviet government to ensure the fact that the USSR would not be damaged by future invasions. Truman wanted the exact opposite. His view was that industrialization and democracy in Germany after the war would guarantee stability. Because they were two exactly opposite views, the two superpowers resulted in a clash. The two leaders disagreed with each other on nearly every issue that came across them.

President Henry Truman helped to make a World Bank, as well implement the International Monetary Fund and the Marshall plan. These two acts helped to rebuild Japan and Germany after the harsh devastation of World War II. The Marshall plan was, indeed, very successful in aiding German markets.  He also prosecuted Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials. Joseph Stalin, whom led the USSR, fought with Truman on almost every issue. He Protested the World Bank, the IMF, and the Marshall Plan. Stalin literally went directly against Truman in the following acts; He had attempted to create a buffer zone in between the Soviet Union and Germany. He also blocked all off highway access in attempt to drive the postwar effort out of Berlin. As you can see, this is what mainly triggered the Cold War.

In conclusion, I have found out that the nineteen sixties were a time of great revolution and great change. Every single aspect of culture in the U.S. was changed, and there were many positive structural developments of society around the world.

The hippie culture was originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the early 1960s and spread around the world. It was one of the many alternative ways of living. The Hippie-movement was a revolution, and a gigantic demonstration against war. The name Hippie comes from the fact that drug-takers in Asia and the Far East used to lie on one hip while smoking opium. They created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs. They talked about peace and love, wore necklaces of coloured beads, decorated cars and houses in lots of colours and gave flowers to the police and to surprised strangers in the street.

         One of the reasons that the hippies got long hair, was to show their resistance against the ”short-haired” soldiers in Vietnam.

           In the late sixties the rock festivals became very popular. Young American, who protested against the war in Vietnam and violence in the world, often expressed themselves through their music.

Woodstock Festival

 In August 1969 the largest rock festival ever held, it took place in New York. Yes, I talk about the Woodstock Festival! Almost half of a million young people, most of them hippies, gathered for three days with peace, love and music. Here “sex, drugs and rock’n roll” ruled the streets. The hippies loved to try out new things, and they trusted each other, so when another hippie came to them with drugs and said: “Its wonderful, you’ll dig it!” they answered “yes” without hesitating. Woodstock was a happy happening and a climax in the hippie-culture. It was very muck drugs around on the Woodstock festival, and people who not died of the drugs, (because some did) say: “If you remember the sixties, you weren’t at Woodstock!”

Music

The “real” hippies listened mostly to psychedelic rock. But Anti-war music became very, very popular in the sixties.

In 1962 Bob Dylan wrote the song “Blowing in the wind”, and it became the most popular song against war in the whole world. The Beatles wrote “all you need is love”, which also became popular. It’s many other musician’s who became popular during the sixties; The Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Jefferson Airplane.

The Hippie Van

The Volkswagen van was very popular. It was cheap, and got space. The hippies painted the van with peace signs, and flowers, and drove around to festivals, or just in the streets. Inside the van, they could take drugs, have sex, and drink alcohol, so it was a rolling paradise for the hippies.

Phillips and film director Polanski enjoyed the jet set life of their Bel Air neighborhood in the late 1960s.  They partied  together, networked sixties-style, had intellectual discussions, and womanized together.  Polanski admitted to having “a European attitude toward sex” despite being married to the beautiful Sharon Tate.  Like Polanski, John Phillips never took his wedding ring seriously.  He left his first wife, Mackinzie’s mother, for a teenage Michelle Gilliam.  While married to Michelle, he ran around constantly although he applied the double standard when Michelle tried to play the same game.  She had affairs with Gene Clark of the Birds and the famed director, Roman Polanski.

The carefree sixties ended the August 1969 weekend when Sharon Tate and six others were brutally murdered.  While the slaughter remained unsolved, Polanski tried to put the blame on John Phillips.  Since Roman had slept with John’s wife, Roman believed that Phillips had hired professionals to kill Sharon and avenge Roman.  Polanski placed a kitchen knife at Phillips throat demanding that John confess.  Finally, the grieving Polanski accepted that the musician had nothing to do with his wife’s murder.

Although Polanski accepted that John Phillips had nothing to do with Sharon’s murder, the friendship of the director and the musician were never the same.  For many years, Polanski was a broken man.  But grief seldom affected Polanski’s womanizing.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Until March 9, 1964 American libel laws were virtually indistinguishable for the British.  In 1964, “freedom of the press” in the United States meant what it still means in the UK “freedom from prior restraint”.  All that changed—or started to change—with the Supreme Court’s verdict in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.

The Case

It is traditional to say that New York Times Co. v. Sullivan started with a political advertisement on Dr. King’s behalf.  But in my opinion, it started much earlier; I think it started with a deeply-felt resentment in much of the South about how people who didn’t understand the South and who were keeping “their” African-Americans in inner cities where White people simply didn’t go, came to the South to agitate and (worse) to judge.  The New York Times newspaper was seen as the epitome of that Northern hypocritical meddling.  All this, long before John Murray, on behalf of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South, reserved space for a full-page ad to raise money to defend Dr. King against the charge that he had committed perjury when he signed his 1956 and 1958 tax returns.

Among other things, the ad (http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/commstud/freespeech/cont/cases/nytsullivan1.html) claimed that:

• Dr. King had been arrested seven times (he had been arrested four times);
• “After students sang ‘My Country, ‘Tis of Thee’ on the State Capitol steps, their leaders were expelled from school”( The students had actually sang the Star Spangled Banner and were expelled not after that but after attempting to be served in the Montgomery Court House)
• “Truckloads of police armed with shotguns and tear-gas ringed the Alabama State College Campus” (The police never “ringed” the school; they were deployed around the school in very large numbers); and
• When the entire student body protested to the state authorities, their dining hall was padlocked” (This never happened at all)

Commissioner L.B. Sullivan sued the New York Times for libel because, as police commissioner, he said that by mentioning the police (of which he was in charge) and doing so erroneously, the New York Times libeled him.  It took the Alabama jury a little over two hours to return a guilty verdict against the New York Times and to award Sullivan $500,000.  Other libel suits swiftly followed.  By the time the case was heard in the Supreme Court, the New York Times was being sued for over five million dollars and CBS was being sued for over one million dollars.

The Arguments

Herbert Weschler, the law professor who argued the Sullivan case before the Supreme Court, could have adopted various strategies to win his case.  He could have:

• Argued that the advertisement cannot be read as referring to Commissioner Sullivan; or
• Alabama did not have jurisdiction in the case.

And those arguments did appear in his brief.  His main argument, however, rested on the First Amendment.  The First Amendment, Weschler argued “pre-supposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection.  To many this is, and always will be, folly; but we have staked our all upon it.  … It is clear that [political debate] is not delimited by any test of truth… not to speak of a test which puts the burden of establishing the truth upon the writer.” 

Weschler further contended that political speech could not be penalized because it damaged official reputation.  To support his case, he quoted Madison’s Report on the Virginia Resolution (http://www.constitution.org/rf/vr_1799.htm ): “…it is manifestly impossible to punish the intent to bring those who administer the government into disrepute or contempt, without striking at the right of freely discussing public characters and measures.”

Weschler further proposed that damages be awarded if falsehoods were published with “actual malice”.  In other words, the person suing would not only have to prove that what was written was false but that the falsehood was printed with malicious intent to defame.

The brief for Sullivan (mostly written by Roland Nachman) in built its case largely around the value of a person’s reputation.  “If The Times prevails,” it read in part, “any false statements about any public officials [could be made].  The absolute immunity would cover false statements that the Secretary of State had given military secrets to the enemy; that the Secretary of the Treasury had embezzled public funds…”

The Verdict

The Supreme Court did not accept Nachman’s argument.  Its decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/nytvsullivan.html ) read in part:

“Thus, we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

….

“Authoritative interpretations of the First Amendment guarantees have consistently refused to recognize an exception for any test of truth–whether administered by judges, juries, or administrative officials–and especially one that puts the burden of proving truth on the speaker.”

With those words, the Supreme Court gave us the freedom not only to speak our minds without prior restraint (as is the case in the UK) but allowed us to make honest mistakes when we do so.  In the name of “robust and wide-open” public debate, we have the right to say that “the Secretary of the Treasury had embezzled public funds” without proof of any sort but also without fear of a lawsuit.  And while the decision did leave some room for an individual (say, the Secretary of the Treasury) to safeguard their reputation, that room was small indeed.

The Aftermath

Public debate in the United States is certainly robust.  It is also (as anyone following the recent Presidential election knows) not free of calumny of the worst kind.  The kind of libel that is a regular feature of our politics simply does not exist in the United Kingdom.

On the other hand, it is also not the case that American bloggers must fear a lawsuit because their posts are not true “in every respect”.  This has meant that there are more American bloggers than British ones and that not infrequently British political bloggers cite American sources with the (mandatory in the UK) “it is said” before the source.

I will let you decide which system is better—and what the ideal balance between a person’s reputation and a person’s freedom of speech ought to be.