jeeshadow: Given the not-so-great shape of the economy at the end of the Jackson Presidency, I think Forbes would move quickly to show that he can do a much better job handling the economy. Interestingly enough, JFK was in the process of getting a tax cut bill through Congress when he got assassinated in November 1963. One of the first things LBJ did as President was to get the tax cut bill passed and signed into law. The tax cut bill that historically got passed generated economic growth, which is what I based the results of the GOP tax cut bill on. The list of items in that bill come from the 1964 Republican platform.
New Dealism is dead. Scoop found that out the hard way. Medicare is not going to happen under the Republicans (to them it is socialized medicine), though it may be something Democrats can rally around. "Elect us and we will establish health insurance for the eldery."
Historically the LBJ landslide of 1964 swept the conservatives aside and made it possible for Johnson to pass his liberal Great Society program. With the conservatives still being in charge of Congress TTL, Forbes can't be too ambitious when it comes to domestic policy. Thomas E. Dewey tried to be ambitious and ended up butting heads with Robert Taft.
I think the race issue will be a headache for Forbes. After all, we are moving into the second half of the 1960s, where racial tensions in cities from Los Angeles to Detroit to Newark exploded. Then there is the question you raised of whether he can get a civil rights bill pass the Goldwater wing of the GOP.
Edmund Muskie is someone I have been thinking about. Historically his campaign sank in 1972 as a result of the forged Canuck letter which had been orchestrated by the Nixon re-election campaign. Without the Canuck letter, perhaps Muskie could have done better.
Eugene McCarthy lost his 1958 Senate bid TTL, so I don't think we will see him at all.
I am leaning towards pitting Hubert Humphrey against President Forbes in 1968. Humphrey is a much better candidate than George McGovern was and Humphrey TTL will be completely free to attack the Vietnam War (instead of historically being under LBJ's controlling thumb). Plus Humphrey was the historical loser in 1968 and I haven't flipped a historical loser into an ahistorical winner since Adlai Stevenson in 1952. So if I decide to have the Democrats win in 1968, it will probably be Humphrey.
Don't you mean Mario Cuomo?
Ah, Joe Biden. Will he or won't he?
I have thought about running Ted Kennedy, but that will depend on his driving skills if you know what I mean.
Since his father never got elected Governor of California TTL, I wonder what impact that would have on Jerry Brown's political fortunes in 1974 since he wouldn't have the name recognition which historically benefitted him.
I have an entirely different view about Nixon as Attorney General. I think he will be just fine in the Forbes Administration.
Hey, I like hearing ideas. That is how Rab Butler ended up as the British Prime Minister. A reader suggested it.
volksmarschall: Well, it is mid-1960s fashion. If anything is to be blamed for the state of modern American society, it is those colors.
I agree. I don't think Forbes will get this whole hippie culture thing.
I actually have this AAR mapped out to 1968. I just wish I had more time to write.
El Pip: That is something I am going to deal with later. LBJ tried to finance the Vietnam War and the Great Society at the same time and discovered to his dismay that he couldn't do both. When you want to cut taxes, cut spending, and fiance a war like Forbes does, doesn't something have to give at some point?
You're right, El Pip. Our tax code is so full of holes you can pretty much do whatever you want if you know how (or know people who know how).
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Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out
“Do your own thing, wherever you have to do it and whenever you want. Drop out. Leave society as you have known it. Leave it utterly. Blow the mind of every straight person you can reach. Turn them on, if not to drugs, then to beauty, love, honesty, fun.”
-The Hippie Code
When you think about music in the 1960s, certain sounds come to mind. There was the Beach Boys, “America’s Band” whose tightly harmonized songs epitomized the Southern California lifestyle of surfing, cars, and girls. Out of Detroit, Michigan came the Motown Sound: African-American artists like the Supremes and Marvin Gaye whose pop-influenced soul music White Americans couldn’t get enough of. With his social and politically conscious lyrics, Bob Dylan was regarded as being “the voice of his generation” (a distinction he regarded as pompous and hated). On February 7th, 1964, four mop-topped lads from Liverpool arrived at Idlewild Airport in New York City. Inspired by Buddy Holly’s band the Crickets, they called themselves the Beatles. Having conquered their native England, John Paul George and Ringo arrived in the Big Apple to find 4,000 screaming fans waiting for them. Their single “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and American girls were just as excited about them as their British sisters were. A record-setting 73 million people tuned in to watch the Beatles perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show” (CBS) and the band even went to the White House to meet President Henry M. Jackson. The enormous popularity of the Beatles in the United States triggered the British Invasion: a wave of British music acts that crossed the pond to find success in the former colonies. Indeed, it was difficult in 1965 to turn on the radio in America and not hear British songs including:
- “Downtown” by Petula Clark
- “I’m Telling You Now” by Freddie and the Dreamers
- “The Game of Love” by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders
- “Mrs. Brown, You’ve got a Lovely Daughter” by Herman’s Hermits
- “Yesterday” by the Beatles
- “Get Off of My Cloud” by the Rolling Stones
- “Over and Over” by the Dave Clark Five
Whereas the Beatles, under the direction of their manager Brian Epstein, presented a clean-cut image, the Rolling Stones were in sharp contrast the bad boys of British rock. Their manager Andrew Loog Oldham deliberately wanted them to be the anti-Beatles:
“a raunchy, gamy, unpredictable bunch of undesirables” who
“were threatening, uncouth, and animalistic.”
A song the Rolling Stones recorded in 1965 captured their rebellious nature. One day guitarist Keith Richards bought a Philips cassette player so he could record song ideas. Before he could use it however, he fell asleep. When he awoke the next morning, Richards discovered that the tape had gone to the end. Rewinding it to the start to hear what was on it, he was surprised to find out that at some point during the night he had gotten up and partially recorded a song. Not having the foggiest recollection of having recorded anything in his sleep, Richards played the tape for the rest of his band mates. They liked what they heard and turned the middle-of-the-night rough recording into a proper single. On June 6th, the Rolling Stones released “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in the United States.
The public reaction to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was immediate. It quickly climbed up the Billboard Hot 100, knocking off “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)” by the Four Tops on July 10th to become the #1 song in America. It remained at the top for four weeks, giving the Rolling Stones their first gold record (meaning it sold over a million copies). The key to the song’s immense popularity was that it tapped into the youthful disillusionment towards the mainstream focus on materialism. In the late 1940s, the strict rationing of the war years gave way to a national shopping spree. Returning World War Two veterans bought brand new homes in the emerging suburbs and started their own families. This became the era of the Baby Boom, in which tens of millions of babies were born at the staggering rate of one every seven seconds. These new cookie-cutter homes of course needed to be stocked with furniture and appliances, creating a hungry demand for consumer goods that businesses were only too happy to fill. It became highly fashionable to buy a brand new car every year – not because you needed it but because your neighbor had the latest model and you wanted to keep up with them. With the introduction of commercial television, TV sets became the must-have item that no home could be without. Everyone wanted to tune in to see what crazy antics Lucy Ricardo and Ralph Kramden were getting themselves into this time. Thanks to TV dinner trays, you could eat and not miss anything.
(Behind the scenes of “The Honeymooners” (CBS). Starring Jackie Gleason and Art Carney, it is one of the classic TV shows of the 1950s)
Having endured the Great Depression and World War Two, adults in the postwar years were eager to enjoy life. For them, enjoyment came through materialism. It was a warm embrace that younger people didn’t share however. They found little satisfaction in simply owning things and wondered if there was more to life than what they considered to be their parents' shallow obsession. A generational divide emerged in America as young people sought to broaden their horizons in ways adults weren’t. They became influenced by a group of writers – most notably Allen Ginsberg – who ridiculed mainstream values like materialism and encouraged their readers to pursue alternative values like psychedelic (Greek for “mind revealing”) drug use and sex. The way to get satisfaction in life, they declared, was to completely reject the shallow-minded status quo and build a counterculture which embraced liberation of all sorts. One man in particular had found the key to unlocking the liberation of the mind. At Harvard University, a psychologist named Timothy Leary had done research on a psychedelic drug called lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). When consumed, LSD altered a person’s perception by creating hallucinations and heightening their sense of color. The psychedelic experience brought on by LSD left users feeling euphoric and free; that they were able to see things in ways they weren’t able to in a normal state of awareness. After consuming LSD himself, Leary became an enthusiastic champion of the drug, promoting it as a way of liberating yourself from the restraints imposed by mainstream society. As he wrote in 1964:
“A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, dimethyltryptamine, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key – it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.”
Among the people being turned on to the consciousness-expanding effects of LSD was Ken Kesey, author of the 1962 novel “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. In the summer of 1964, Kesey and his group of so-called Merry Pranksters embarked on a cross-country school bus trip to spread the gospel of LSD to anyone who was open-minded enough to listen to them. Through promotion LSD became the drug of choice for the counterculture – with marijuana, another mind-altering drug, coming in second place popularity-wise. Drug use in the United States grew so rampant that in 1966 it was deemed by “Time” magazine and others to be a national problem that needed to be addressed. In his January 1967 State of the Union Address, President Malcolm Forbes announced that his Administration would vigorously crack down on
“narcotics and dangerous drugs, which at present are flooding the streets of our cities and turning our young people into addicts of such drugs as marijuana and LSD.”
A few months later, Congress passed and Forbes signed into law the Narcotics Control Act of 1967. The new Federal law officially made the use of drugs like LSD and marijuana completely illegal and imposed a mandatory sentencing for drug convictions of 2-to-10 years in prison with a fine up to $20,000. In the law’s first year, over 500 people were arrested for drug possession. However, that didn’t stop the counterculture from loving LSD and marijuana. If anything, the law encouraged people to do those drugs as an act of defiance against the conservative Establishment which was trying to unduly control them. The phrase
“Take a hit for Dick” emerged within the counterculture to mock Attorney General Richard Nixon, who led the crackdown on drugs.
(Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead)
As the counterculture developed in the mid-1960s, communities sprouted up across America where people could go to experience freedom from societal restrictions. The most famous community was located in the Victorian-style Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, California. With rooms being very cheap to rent, Haight-Ashbury became a Mecca for the counterculture as many people flowed into the neighborhood – 15,000 by June 1966 – to take part in the alternative lifestyle. Here you could see young men sporting very long hair and women wearing revealing clothing in public – often with no bra underneath. Those who really wanted to stand out wore colorful tie-dyed T-shirts. In 1967, singer Scott McKenzie advised anyone going to San Francisco to
“be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”
After seeing these people for himself, journalist Herb Caen of the “San Francisco Chronicle” dubbed them “hippies” for the way they were sharply contrasting with
“the straight world.”
Not only were hippies experimenting with psychedelic drugs, they were also being sexually active. Viewing the tradition of only having sex with your married partner as being part of the status quo that they were rebelling against, hippies were more opened-minded about recreational sex. They saw nothing wrong with having multiple partners and doing it whenever they wanted and wherever they wanted. In this pre-HIV/AIDS era, there wasn’t a great emphasis on the health dangers of unprotected sex. For women in particular, their risk of getting an unwanted pregnancy was eliminated when the birth control pill became widely available in 1965. By preventing the release of eggs from the ovaries, the pill made it possible for women to enjoy recreational sex without worrying about becoming pregnant.
(Hippies who embraced flowers were known as “flower children”)
Of course, you can’t talk about sex and drugs without talking about the third pillar: rock and roll. Originating from African-American rhythm and blues music, rock and roll music exploded onto the national scene in the 1950s. Rock and roll singers like Elvis Presley and Little Richard became idols for teenagers who loved having music to call their own. That white teenagers couldn’t get enough of this music which had a strong black beat to it didn’t sit well with parents, who viewed rock and roll as being a corrupting influence on youths (interestingly, 1950s teenagers would go on to view MTV the same way in the 1980s). In keeping with the changing times, rock and roll in the 1960s took a psychedelic turn. Electric guitars, elaborate studio effects, and a strong keyboard presence all became prominent features while the lyrics grew deeper and more expansive. New musical acts playing the psychedelic sound appeared on the scene including:
- Cream
- Grateful Dead
- Janis Joplin
- Jefferson Airplane
- Jimi Hendrix
- Pink Floyd
- Sly and the Family Stone
- The Byrds
- The Doors
- The Mamas and the Papas
Founded in Los Angeles, California in 1965, the Doors was fronted by Jim Morrison, a University of California, Los Angeles film school graduate who loved poetry and was a voracious reader of philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Plutarch. This philosophical influence was reflected in the poetry Morrison wrote as well as the lyrics he contributed to the Doors such as “Break on Through (To the Other Side)” and “The End” – the latter including a reference to Sigmund Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex in which a child has an unconscious sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent and hatred for the same-sex parent. Morrison named the band after “The Doors of Perception”, a philosophical work published by Aldous Huxley in 1954. In turn, Huxley had named his book after a phrase in British poet William Blake’s 1793 book “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
(In September 1967, the Doors performed their #1 hit “Light My Fire” on “The Ed Sullivan Show”. Originally they were asked by the show’s producer to change the line “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher” due to its drug connation. Morrison agreed to make the change...but then went ahead and sang the line as-is live on the air. When told afterwards by the angry producer that the Doors would never appear on the show again, Morrison just shrugged it off. “Hey man. We just did the Sullivan show.”)
At the same time new acts were emerging, some established acts shifted musical gears. One of the most obvious was the Beach Boys. Formed in Hawthorne, California in 1961, the Beach Boys had established themselves as one of the most popular bands in America through a string of hits like “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Fun, Fun, Fun”. However by the mid-1960s leader Brian Wilson had grown musically restless. He wasn’t satisfied with his band just churning out songs about surfing, cars, and girls (
“the formula” as Mike Love put it); he wanted the Beach Boys to have deeper-meaning songs.
“We needed to grow. Up to this point we had milked every idea dry,” he later explained.
“We had done every possible angle about surfing and then we did the car routine. But we needed to grow artistically.”
Wilson therefore retired from touring, his spot on stage being filled for a while by an up-and-coming singer named Glen Campbell. He stayed behind in the studio, where he was free to focus all his attention on turning the new sound that he had envisioned for the band into reality. Despite some apprehension from the other band members that Wilson’s new sound for them was too different, in May 1966 the Beach Boys released their eleventh studio album “Pet Sounds”. Featuring an eclectic mixture of sounds and introspective lyrics like “God Only Knows” and “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”, “Pet Sounds” was a progressive departure from their earlier work. Although it wasn’t a commercial success in the US (it was much more popular in England though), “Pet Sounds” critically earned the reputation of being one of the greatest albums of all time. Critics have hailed the album for its influential music production and sophisticated songs. In the 2009 book “101 Albums that Changed Popular Music”, “Pet Sounds” was described as being
“one of the most innovative recordings in rock” which
“elevated Brian Wilson from talented bandleader to studio genius.”
The Beatles loved “Pet Sounds”, which came out at a time when they were re-evaluating their own priorities. Constant touring had made the Beatles the biggest band in the world, but it left the four band members feeling exhausted and constrained. They wanted to do more complex songs than what the two-guitars-bass-and-drums stage performances would allow. Following their third US concert tour in August 1966 (which was overshadowed by John Lennon’s controversial remark that his band was more popular than Jesus Christ), the Beatles made the decision to retire from touring and become exclusively a studio band. This provided them the freedom to focus on recording more elaborate music and creating an album that would be their own “Pet Sounds”. In May 1967, the Beatles released their eighth studio album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. The album was an immediate hit, selling 2.5 million copies in the first three months and was #1 on both sides of the Atlantic for multiple weeks. From the psychedelic imagery of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” to the orchestral crescendos in “A Day in the Life”, “Sgt. Pepper” showed that the Beatles were artistically maturing through their songwriting and music production. That they could do far more than peppy love songs aimed at teenage girls. “Sgt. Pepper” joined “Pet Sounds” as one of the greatest albums of all time, described by “Rolling Stone” magazine as being
“the pinnacle of the Beatles’ eight years as recording artists.”