UNITED STATES HISTORY

SECTION II
Part A
(Suggested writing time -- 45 minutes)
Percent of Section II score -- 45

Directions: The following question requires you to construct a coherent essay that integrates your interpretation of
Documents A-I and your knowledge of the period referred to in the question. High scores will be earned only by
essays that both cite key pieces of evidence from the documents and draw on outside knowledge of the period.

1. The 1960s is often characterized as a time of turbulence, protest, and disillusionment as a result of the
actions of the baby boomer generation when they came of age. The 1950s is seen as the decade of
conformity and prosperity. Analyze the ways in which the society of the 1950s influenced the social
movements and political ideology of the baby boomers in the 1960s.

Document A

Source: David Harris, Stanford student body president, calls for other college students to sever ties
with the Selective Service and return their draft cards to the government, 1966.

As young people facing that war, as people who are confronted with the choice of being in that war
or not, we have an obligation to speak to this country, and that statement has to be made this way:
that this war will not be made in our names, that this war will not be made with our hands, that we
will not carry the rifles to butcher the Vietnamese, and that the prisons of the United States will be
full of young people who will not honor the orders of murder.

Document B

Source: Time Magazine, The Baby Boomer Generation as Man of the Year 1966.

Never have the young been left more completely to their own devices. No Adult can or will tell
them what earlier generations were told: this is God, that is Good, this is Art, that is Not Done.
 Document C
The first lunch counter sit-in at Greensboro, 1968:

Document D

Source: Betty Friedan, The Feminist Mystique, 1963.

Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched
slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and
Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent
question — "Is this all?"

Document E

Source: Anne Kelley, "Suburbia -- Is it a Child's Utopia?", The New York Times Magazine, 1958.

Pressures on children to conform, to be popular, to achieve and generally to fit in with the
group amount to a squeeze. They…have no time left for daydreams….
Suburban life, for children, is over-organized; the father has little time at home because of
commuting demands; the mother becomes sole disciplinarian and 24-hour chauffeur;
population turnover is great, with a resulting lack of stability; materialism is glorified, with
sports cars, patios, hi-fi and country clubs set upon an altar….
 Document F

Source: Tom Hayden, "Port Huron Statement," 1962.

The decline of utopia and hope is one of the defining features of social life today….the
horrors of the 20th century, symbolized in the gas ovens and concentration camps and
atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness.…To be idealistic is to be considered deluded…

Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity — but
might it not better be called a glaze above deeply-felt anxieties about their role in the new
world?

…We seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation,…a participatory

democracy….The political order should provide outlets for the expression of personal
grievance and aspiration…

To turn these possibilities into realities will involve national efforts at university reform by
an alliance of students and faculty. They must wrest control of the educational process
from the administrative bureaucracy. They must make…contact with allies in labor, civil
rights, and other liberal forces outside the campus. They must import major public issues

Kim Herzinger, a college student:

"By 1966, I was firmly and insistently opposed to the war in Vietnam. By then, a number of things seemed true…It
was no longer possible to watch the nightly news without having to confront the fact that Americans were
apparently capable of the kinds of atrocities we had not thought imaginable. What we knew about war had come
mainly from World War II movies. We had looked very good in them, and the evil we were confronting then was
clear to all. We did not look so good burning down villages, spreading napalm over the countryside…

It was with the draft that the Establishment, under suspicion as illegitimate when it came to exercising its wrath
and self-interest in our name, was insisting on its power to coerce precisely those people who were most inclined to
resist every kind of coercive power-a generation particularly given to confrontation, one that felt marginalized by
traditional authority and chafed by traditional cultural habits and attitudes, dominated by political, social, and
cultural confrontations with authority, and participants in an active counterculture which celebrated its
rebelliousness, its outsider status, its marginality."

 Andrew Wiest, The Vietnam War, 1956-1975 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 76,

http://www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=108632685.

David Harris, Stanford student body president, calls for other college students to sever ties with the
Selective Service and return their draft cards to the government:
"As young people facing that war, as people who are confronted with the choice of being in that war or not, we
have an obligation to speak to this country, and that statement has to be made this way: that this war will not be
made in our names, that this war will not be made with our hands, that we will not carry the rifles to butcher the
Vietnamese, and that the prisons of the United States will be full of young people who will not honor the orders of
murder."

 Michael S. Foley, Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 19, http://www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=116684546.

Brigid Brophy's artice "Women are Prisoners of their Sex" (1963)

"Women are free. At least, they look free. They even feel free. But in reality, women in the western,
industrialized world today are like the animals in a modern zoo. There are no bars…Yet in practice women
are still kept in their place just as firmly as the animals are kept in their closures…
So brilliantly has society contrived to terrorize women with this threat that certain behavior is unnatural and
unwomanly, that it has left them no time to consider--or even sheerly observe--what womanly nature really
is."
Brophy, Brigid. "WOMEN ARE PRISONERS OF THEIR SEX." Saturday Evening Post 236, no. 38 (November 2, 1963): 10-
12. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 15, 2011).

Time Magazine announces that the Man of the Year of 1966 is the Baby Boomer Generation:
"Never have the young been left more completely to their own devices. No Adult can or will tell them what
earlier generations were told: this is God, that is Good, this is Art, that is Not Done.
Today's young man accepts none of the old start-on-the-bottom rung formulas that directed his father's
career…From Bombay to Berkeley, Vinh Long to Volgograd, he has clearly signaled his determination to live
according to his own lights and rights."