1968 A people divided, a country on edge
sexual revolution in which lovemaking and childbirth were partially decoupled.
By 1968, the antiwar activism initiated mostly by elite intellectuals had merged with a broader countercultural youth movement that celebrated music, drugs, fashion, sexual mores and alternative media all crafted in opposition to their parents’ generation. This was ‘‘the dawning of the Age of Aquarius’’, a time of ‘‘sympathy and trust abounding’’ when ‘‘love will steer the stars’’ – or so insisted the hit musical Hair ,a show about antiwar hippies that broke Broadway taboos by featuring nudity, drug use, a racially mixed cast and a rock score.
‘‘They call themselves flower children,’’ Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate for president, said that year. ‘‘I call them spoiled rotten.’’
Curiously, the culture war broke out when, on paper at least, things were supposedly going well for many Americans. Unemployment was unusually low. Fuel was cheap. Cities were bursting out into suburbs, driven, in part, by the possibilities of bigger homes, safer streets and a more bucolic life.
More Americans were going to college, science and technology were making major advances, man was about to walk on the Moon.
But progress left many behind. Those suburbs bloomed in good part because white parents decided they would rather commute long distances than have their children go to schools experiencing rapid racial change.
Anxiety and fear were palpable, made worse by what felt like a dizzying fall from one of the most optimistic periods in US history. To the generation that had lived through that time of victory and rising satisfaction, 1968 felt like a collapse into moral decadence, political turmoil and physical decay.
Through most of the year, the nation watched in humiliation as North Korea captured the US Navy ship Pueblo, put its 83 crewmen in prison camps, tortured them and displayed them as propaganda trophies before finally releasing them shortly before Christmas.
Inside the radical movements, efforts to paper over differences between the races in goals and methods mostly failed. During a takeover of buildings at Columbia University in New York, white students tried to win support from black schoolmates by adopting the slogans of black