La década de los 60 fue de una desconocida prosperidad económica en Estados Unidos. Prácticamente había pleno empleo y los sueldos eran buenos. Las familias podían acceder a casas en propiedad y adquirían coches. Hollywood retrató ese ambiente en multitud de películas: una madre monísima con un delantal impoluto preparando cakes in a dream kitchen, a children repipis and fair point of mischief and a charming father who spent the weekend mowing the lawn.
seems incredible that in such an environment is found that the 60 were a decade characterized by social upheaval. On the one hand there was the civil rights movement itself did not induce violence, but its repression and the reaction of the sectors opposed to Negroes have rights. But it has already been discussed in this blog.
The other major cause of violence in the streets was Vietnam. American involvement in the Indochina conflict dates back to the command of Eisenhower. The U.S. military advisers remained military service personnel, but in principle not involved in the fighting. It was JFK who intervened politically and militarily in the country, leading a coup that brought the country to head a puppet, Nguyen Van Thieu.
When LBJ became president met an inherited war, as it evolved, difficult to pull out of the hands, though I was against it. The war was used, as well as electoral argument by both Republicans and Democrats, as an extension of the Cold War. Vietnam had become a battleground between Communists and capitalists. A battlefield in which the less I had to say was the population: without a structured and trained army and weapons fast, unable to cope with the northern army and the guerrillas, more and more numerous.
In 1967 Johnson was a prisoner of war who never liked: "Sometimes," he said to Congress, we are compelled to choose a great evil to prevent a greater one. I wish I could report that the war is about to end. I can not. We face more cost, more loss of life and more trouble, because the order has not arrived yet. "
known fact that the growing malaise in American society before the war in Vietnam. Remember that there is still conscription, so that any girl could be sent to the other side of the world to fight invisible enemies for a cause that certainly did not understand.
The American media were not generous with the participation of his country in Vietnam. The information on abuses committed by American troops - there was no strict censorship prevents the diffusion current image particularly uncomfortable-linked to the continuous low, deaths of civilians, the wounded and the return of young people trapped in the drug world -opium was one of the most important economic resources Vietnamese-not helped to increase support.
actions protesting the Vietnam War spread across the country. Young people saw their future truncated, many fled to Canada to escape their military obligations. College campuses have become battlegrounds.
In 1967, Nixon published an article stating that the United States only three years had gone from living the decade of greatest social progress to be one of the most violent countries. He claimed that this was due to the lack of authority and lack of respect for the law.
Johnson accused the administration of permissiveness towards the "supporters of a cause concrete "and tolerance for crime. Specifically, Nixon did not cut hard to point to blacks as the source of increased crime, ensuring that there was "some sympathy for the injustices they had suffered in the past that are now criminals."
The argument of law and order of the Republicans was in the campaign that brought Nixon to power. One argument that is reinforced with the intention of the Democratic candidate McGovern, to withdraw troops from Vietnam and was answered by the Republicans as a sign of weakness against the Communist enemy.
