1969 was a year with a distinct economic, social, political, and intellectual atmosphere. After the end of World War II in 1945, the US experienced great economic prosperity lasting until the 1970s where sound employment could be obtained relatively easily for both skilled and unskilled work. The affluence this created also caused a baby boom where birth rates temporarily increased, and in 1969, many of those born in the baby boom now made up 8 million young adults going though college. This issue of LIFE Magazine from December 12, 1969 specifically emphasizes how these two features of society created a dominant middle-class culture increasingly fascinated by intellectual pursuits and purchasing luxury items, generational tensions between the
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College campuses were rampant with protests throughout the 1960s, but the year 1969 represented a point of disillusionment with protest as a means of social change because students were not seeing the results that they demanded and they felt the government was not allowing them to properly exercise their right to protest. The article “Campus ’69: The Quiet Year So Far” illustrates this attitude through a sampling of letters and pictures from students of various universities describing the atmosphere. A University of Chicago student sums up the frustrations students are feeling with the attitudes of their elders. “We share a large degree of outrage – outrage at the hypocrisies of an older generation… outrage most of all at the war that goes on and on, killing men for a cause that is now admitted to be mistake, spending billions of dollar on the other side of the globe while millions of out people are hungry and cold...”. A University of Wisconsin student writes “Much of the hypertension on campus stems from the university’s use of city riot police to break up a sit-in against Dow Chemical two years ago.”, showing how the government resorted to unjust violence to breakup peaceful protestors, an act which shocked, angered, and instilled fear into college students around the country. At Berkeley, “Students are afraid of another cycle of gassing by helicopter, afraid of clubbing, afraid arrest and another 22 days of National Guard occupation.” Students feel powerless fighting against their own government and big companies, and one student refers to the state of student politics as “hitting our heads
College campuses were rampant with protests throughout the 1960s, but the year 1969 represented a point of disillusionment with protest as a means of social change because students were not seeing the results that they demanded and they felt the government was not allowing them to properly exercise their right to protest. The article “Campus ’69: The Quiet Year So Far” illustrates this attitude through a sampling of letters and pictures from students of various universities describing the atmosphere. A University of Chicago student sums up the frustrations students are feeling with the attitudes of their elders. “We share a large degree of outrage – outrage at the hypocrisies of an older generation… outrage most of all at the war that goes on and on, killing men for a cause that is now admitted to be mistake, spending billions of dollar on the other side of the globe while millions of out people are hungry and cold...”. A University of Wisconsin student writes “Much of the hypertension on campus stems from the university’s use of city riot police to break up a sit-in against Dow Chemical two years ago.”, showing how the government resorted to unjust violence to breakup peaceful protestors, an act which shocked, angered, and instilled fear into college students around the country. At Berkeley, “Students are afraid of another cycle of gassing by helicopter, afraid of clubbing, afraid arrest and another 22 days of National Guard occupation.” Students feel powerless fighting against their own government and big companies, and one student refers to the state of student politics as “hitting our heads