The End of the Era ...

Glad you asked. A friend, who remembers it well, once said in America "the Sixties" really means "in college between 1968 and 1972." Bad depictions of the Sixties have everybody becoming a hippie after JFK was shot and the Beatles visited America, in 1964. It wasn't like that all. Atlantic City the summer of '65 was still "the '50s" just like American Graffiti set in '62. By 1973 the change to Middle America's culture was complete. No more fedoras or thin ties; lots of wide ties and wide lapels, garish colors, leisure suits, and helmet hair for men and boys.

I always pictured the "sixties" as beginning when Johnson took office and ending when Nixon left office but even that is skewed. It doesn't take into account the fantasy world of Malibu beaches and beach parties, secret agents, Volkswagens, pegged pants, Playboy Clubs and dress up days in high school. None of that had anything to do with the counter culture, which is an interesting term in itself. I always interpreted it to mean anti-culture. I have absolutely no idea what "the era" means as the word is used here, although I recognize that eras can be discretely defined (but usually to no purpose).

Never had a leisure suit (my father did), had lots of narrow (not thin) ties and still do. Never been to Malibu but I've been to Santa Monica (as well as Oklahoma). Never knew a secret agent, although I've been to a ceremony at the CIA in McLean, Virginia. My first car was a Volkswagen but I only owned it for a few months. Never had another one. Never went to a Playboy club and now it's too late; never been to a Hooter's, either. Never cared for dress up days at school but now I wear dress clothes every day except on Friday. I wish we had a clothing optional day here but that's asking a lot.

People picture the most-ballyhooed developments as representing "the 60s." Hippies, communes and drug culture were restricted to a tiny minority but the publications of the time would have you thinking they were taking over the culture. The Pill, on the other hand, wrought vast changes throughout society. STDs had been largely eliminated by the "miracle drugs"of the post-WWII era. Now the two greatest fears about sex; STDs and unwanted pregnancy, had been all but eliminated. Legalized abortion soon followed. For the first and last time in history, sex wasn't scary. The last vestiges of censorship were struck down by '71 and porn went from Tijuana Bibles and stag films to a multibillion dollar industry. Sexual fear returned with AIDS in the early 80s and the new, drug-resistant strains may bring it all back, but for a while there, we had libertinage on big scale. That was one of the lasting legacies of "the 60s."

We can only say that because none of us remember the twenties.

Pretty much. The sexual libertinism of the twenties would cause the most jaded hippie to blush. The big difference was that in the twenties, there was still a public pretense of shock at what was going on -- by the mid-seventies, no one bothered to be shocked by anything.

BlueTrain said:

I always pictured the "sixties" as beginning when Johnson took office and ending when Nixon left office but even that is skewed. It doesn't take into account the fantasy world of Malibu beaches and beach parties, secret agents, Volkswagens, pegged pants, Playboy Clubs and dress up days in high school. None of that had anything to do with the counter culture, which is an interesting term in itself. I always interpreted it to mean anti-culture. I have absolutely no idea what "the era" means as the word is used here, although I recognize that eras can be discretely defined (but usually to no purpose).

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I think the Era means whatever the person saying it means. When I say "the Era" (and I don't say "Golden"), I generally mean the period of American culture extending from 1933 to 1945: the Roosevelt Era, in other words. The attitudes and worldview of Americans post-FDR had very little in common with that of the FDR Era, and I don't know what people want to call that. I just call it "the postwar era" for want of a better term. If I want to get under some peoples' skin, I'll call it the Boomer Era, but the boomers didn't really come into their own as a driving cultural force until the 1960s. If I had to pin down, I'd call 1946-56 "the Paranoid Era" and 1957-72 "the Space Age, which existed side-by-side with the "Counter-Culture Age" that began with the Beats and ended with the re-election of Nixon.

I suppose those are as good a term as any for those eras. But to some extent, though hardly always, such terms are usually applied after the fact, when the good times are past, if there were any. Sometimes, I think (and sometimes I think) people are nostalgic for a period that wasn't really all that great, like the war years, but there were certain things that were good, or so people believed. The odd thing of speaking of eras is that mostly the same people are living through them, meaning more than one period. And I think it's been a while since I've seen reference to the beat generation.

Which is odd, given how merchandised it was when it was going on. "Buy a Beat Generation tieclasp! A Beat Generation keychain! A Beat Generation ring!" But aside from the Boys' angle on it, there's a direct line from the beats to the hippies, if not in dress style or musical taste than in the outsider mindset. They were both ends of a single postwar "counterculture" that rose up in response to the smiley-faced blandness of the mainstream culture of the time.



To take ages a little further, maybe call 1972-80 the Great Malaise, 1980-89 the Age of Bombast, 1990-2001 the Age of Distraction, and 2001 to the present The New Paranoia.