The Myth and The Maelstrom: The Kennedy's Era

The Myth and the Maelstrom: Kennedy’s era






As the complacent 1950s yielded to another decade, few if any people foresaw the collapse of Eisenhower’s bouyant optimism and by the end of the decade deploring voices resonated the triumph of materialistic values that arrived with what John Kenneth Galbraith had labeled "the affluent society." Financial wealth, however was only a wishful thinking and amidst the fear and the concern of the general public of an inevitable downturn in the economy, civilian demonstrations began also to appear. In an unlikely corner of the country in Greensboro, North Carolina where, just one month into the decade, on 1 February, four black freshmen from a nearby college sat down and asked for coffee. It took them nearly six months to get service but by then they had set in motion the completion of a Second Reconstruction and had introduced two salient styles of the 1960s: civil disobedience and the youth rebellion, two protean phenomena that woul...