Projecting the End of the American Dream: Hollywood's Visions of U. S. Decline by Arnold Gordon B.;

Author:Arnold, Gordon B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO, LLC

End of a Turbulent Decade

The month after Easy Rider was released, an event in rural New York provided one of the watershed moments of the 1960s-era counterculture. The festival at Woodstock, which was promoted as “3 days of peace & music,” attracted a huge number of attendees—estimates range from 300,000 to 500,000 people. (Director Michael Wadleigh’s concert film of the festival, simply titled Woodstock, was released the following year.) Over the three days, the crowd listened to rock music and, as described by writer James Perone, “lived for three days in a manner that showed a complete rejection of suburban, military-industrial-complex-based concepts of what American should be.”55 It was also, as observed in a special edition of Life magazine devoted to the event, “a display of the authority of drugs over a whole generation.”56

A similar event was held in California that December. Billed as the Altamont Speedway Free Festival and attracting several hundred thousand people, this festival too featured rock music and widespread drug use by the audience. (The event, which was recorded by documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, was the subject of the 1970 movie Gimme Shelter.) Unlike the event in Woodstock, however, the concert in Altamont was marred by violence. As a contemporary news account reported, four people died—one from a stabbing that occurred as the Rolling Stones performed—in the one-day event, in which “a handful of incidents, most involving Hell’s Angels motorcycle toughs, marred an otherwise peaceful exercise in togetherness by young students, hippies, teeny-boppers and other rock fans.”57 Although it may have been “a handful of incidents,” it was enough to mar the public perception of the event, especially among traditionally minded Americans who were appalled at the lifestyle and politics of those in the younger generation who embraced the counterculture. Coming in the last month of the last year of the 1960s, in some ways the downbeat aura of the Altamont Festival seemed to sum up the disturbing, disruptive decade.

The crises of the 1960s had a divisive effect on American society, significantly tarnishing the ideals and optimism that the American Dream idea had represented just two decades earlier. Assassinations, riots, and war had been a big part of this development. More than that was the social upheaval that swept across the cultural landscape. Established ways of thinking and behaving had been thrown into question. The future was unclear, since many of the things that had caused these changes in society were not yet resolved. The war in Vietnam dragged on and continued to spark dissent. A nationwide moratorium to end the war in Vietnam was held in October 1969 in communities and college campuses across the nation. An estimated quarter million demonstrators gathered to protest the war in Washington, DC.

Beyond the war, issues of race and gender—the unfinished work of the civil rights and women’s movements—were still contested. Traditional social order was in doubt, as evidenced by fears of rising crime and widespread drug use. Such anxieties and doubts had chipped away at the United States’ trust in its institutions, generating skepticism and disaffection.

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