Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In 1964, Theodore Roszak, who would later write the bestselling genre classic The Making of a Counterculture (1968), surveyed Los Angeles and found it deeply depressing: “There is perhaps no modern city where the sense of community is so dissipated in Los Angeles.” Writing in the pages of the Los Angeles Free Press – which by 1970 would be the most widely circulated “underground” newspaper in the United States – Roszak invoked a commonly held truism. Often perceived from afar by critics of mainstream culture as an unholy mix of right-wing politics, white-bread sameness, and anti-intellectual mass cultural production, Los Angeles hardly seemed like a city that could generate a viable radical culture. Indeed, a few years after Roszak's complaint, the New Left-oriented political scientists Michael Rogin and John Shover (1970) blamed the rise of Reagan on southern Californians, whom they believed to be right-wing authoritarians and conformists.Yet events in mid-1960s Los Angeles – the Watts riot, the emergence of the New Left, and the growth of a sizeable counterculture – would upend conventional wisdom about the region. By the early 1970s, Los Angeles would house one of the largest countercultures in the world, along with a variety of other radical movements. How did this happen? Certainly, national political events such as the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement were crucial. ... log in or subscribe to read full text