The generation that came of age in the 1960s was the
first generation of Americans to grow up watching
television and escaping from the summer heat in air-
conditioned stores, offices, theaters, houses, and cars.
It was a generation imbued with a sense of idealism,
sparked by the short-lived Kennedy administration
and Lyndon Johnson’s dream of creating a “Great
Society” without poverty or hunger. It was a genera-
tion inspired by the endless possibilities made visible
by the dawn of the space age. It was also the first gen-
eration whose members had lived all their lives with
the possibility of nuclear war looming over them like
a dark cloud.
The sixties generation was predominantly urban
and suburban (the 1960 U.S. population of 180 mil-
lion was 70 percent urban) and the product of an
era of affluence and consumerism. It questioned not
only its parents’ wholehearted faith in technology
and industrialization, but also their attitudes toward
other human beings and other living things. Econom-
ically secure yet dissatisfied with the status quo, these
youthful rebels launched a massive push for social
change that took a variety of forms, ranging from the
civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War protests,
and the large counterculture movement of the 1960s
to the environmental movement that reached a peak
in the 1970s.
The launching of Sputnik in 1957, the first
manned space flight in 1961, and the first walk on the
moon in 1969 provided the world with a whole new
perspective on the place of the earth and humans in
the universe. Commercial air travel had become com-
monplace in the 1950s, but by the early 1960s, jets
were replacing propeller planes on long-distance
routes and changing relationships among people and
businesses throughout the world. Computers were
just starting to have an effect on the workplace, bio-
technology was barely in the gestational stage, and
the promises of science and technology had captured
the public’s imagination and loosened the govern-
ment’s purse strings.
Industrial and agricultural production was at an
all-time high. Between 1950 and 1970, the increase
in the production of goods and services matched
the increase that had occurred between 1620, when
the Pilgrims landed, and 1950.^1 The downside of