The Legacy of 1967: A Leading Historian Assesses the Year That Split America in Two

New year's eve, San Francisco. Country Joe and the Fish play the final set at the Avalon Ballroom, ushering in 1967. That same night, Big Brother and the Holding Company, fronted by Janis Joplin, perform nearby in Golden Gate Park. Two weeks later, 20,000 people pack the park for the first Human Be-In - a foretaste of the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury. Timothy Leary, in a phrase of his own invention, tells the assembled tribe to "turn on, tune in, drop out."'

The Age of Aquarius is dawning in 1967 - but so is another, very different age. A hundred miles from San Francisco, less than twenty-four hours after the last chord dies at the Avalon, governor-elect Ronald Reagan takes the oath of office in Sacramento at the stroke of midnight. Reagan, who has won the election by telling lurid, fanciful tales of college orgies and promising to root out communists at Berkeley, declares that universities must transmit "accepted moral and ethical standards."'

A dozen years ago, Reagan was a washed-up B-movie actor, presiding over the official opening of Disneyland. Now he is the hard-line conservative governor of the nation's most populous state--with his inauguration festivities staged by the Walt Disney Company.

The stock images of 1967- hippies and free love, political dissent and upheaval - are strong and enduring. The year brought important breakthroughs in what historian Theodore Roszak later described as "the making of a counter culture." By the decade's end, civil rights protests, having formally destroyed Jim Crow, also inspired new egalitarian movements for the rights of women, gays and other denigrated groups. Anti-war protests forced a fresh reckoning with the conventional wisdom about America's role in global affairs. Concerns about the environment grew to the point where even government bureaucrats were forced to take notice. A sexual frankness mixed with both communal adhesiveness and insistent individualism - the long- suppressed tradition of Walt Whitman - washed over American culture.

Yet, as the contrasting scenes from that New Year's Eve suggest, the stock images are also incomplete. Even as the counterculture was helping to transform America into a nation of greater tolerance and freedom, the country was beginning a long-term political shift to the right. The Republican Party was back in force, swearing in forty-seven new congressmen--including a transplanted Connecticut Yankee from Texas named George H.W. Bush. Like Reagan, Bush had endorsed Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. Together, the two men would play a prominent role in the conservative resurgence that has reshaped America's political landscape just as surely as the Summer of Love reshaped the cultural landscape. We should remember 1967 not as the time the nation turned on and tuned in but as the moment the United States began hurtling toward a nervous breakdown, riven by conflict that would change the country and the world forever. It was the beginning of an era of intense polarization - one in which, arguably, we are still living. More than a momentous year, 1967 was a seedbed for our own times.