A gradual change, not a single year
American values did shift during the 1960s, but they did not shift in 1967 alone. Most measurable change came over a longer span, and much of it showed up in surveys only in the early 1970s. What 1967 provided was visibility: for the first time, large numbers of Americans saw a youth culture openly challenging conventions, and the debate over what it meant became national.
It also matters who changed. Opinion polls of the period generally found that younger, college-educated and urban Americans moved first and furthest, while older and more rural groups tended to hold their positions. The picture is one of a widening gap between groups, not a country that changed its mind all at once.
Authority and trust
Trust in government was relatively high in the early 1960s and declined over the following decade, a pattern recorded in long-running national surveys. The reasons are debated. The Vietnam War, the gap between official optimism and events on the ground, urban riots and later Watergate are all commonly cited. By 1967, many young people, and a growing number of older ones, had begun to question statements by officials, a mood that critics sometimes called a credibility gap.
Respect for other institutions was also being tested, from universities to the police. The student protests at Berkeley in 1964 had made campus authority a public issue, and the continuing campus protest of 1967 kept it there.
Sex and family
The most important change was probably in the availability of contraception. The birth control pill was approved for contraceptive use in the United States in 1960, and the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut struck down a state ban on contraceptive use by married couples. Together with a changing public conversation about sex, these developments contributed to more open attitudes, especially among younger people.
The slogan of free love was loudly associated with the counterculture, but surveys suggest that most people’s behaviour and views changed more slowly and unevenly than the slogans imply. Many hippies themselves lived fairly conventional private lives, and the movement’s treatment of women was often traditional, a point later feminist writers made forcefully.
Religion
Church attendance in the United States was high in the 1950s and drifted downward from the 1960s, although the exact figures depend on how it is measured. A Time magazine cover in April 1966 asking “Is God Dead?” reflected a wider anxiety about secularisation. At the same time, interest in Eastern religions, meditation and personal spiritual experience grew among the young. For many, the trend was less a loss of belief than a move away from organised denominations, a theme developed further in the discussion of religion and the counterculture.
Patriotism and the war
Patriotism was perhaps the most contested value. For many Americans, especially those who remembered the Second World War, loyalty to the flag and support for the nation’s military commitments seemed beyond question. For many younger Americans, the war in Vietnam raised the possibility that patriotism could include dissent.
Public opinion on the war changed gradually. Polls in the mid-1960s generally showed majority support for the American role. By 1967, support had been eroding, and national surveys reportedly began to find, around the autumn of that year, that as many or more respondents considered the decision to send troops a mistake as did not. The movement against the war was still a minority position, however, and opinion on how to end the war was divided between hawks and doves; many people who disliked the war were also hostile to protesters. Polls repeatedly showed that large numbers of Americans disapproved of demonstrations even when they questioned the war itself.
The reaction
The cultural change provoked a backlash, and some of it was already visible in 1967. Ronald Reagan won the California governorship in 1966 partly by criticising campus unrest, and the Governor Reagan administration that followed made the clash between campus and state a political theme. Riots in Newark and Detroit in July 1967 hardened attitudes on race and order for many voters.
The phrase “Silent Majority” came later. President Richard Nixon used it in a television speech on 3 November 1969 to appeal to Americans who, he argued, supported his Vietnam policy but did not demonstrate. The label was a political construction, and historians point out that it simplified a complicated range of opinions. Still, it captured something real: a sizeable part of the public felt unsettled by the pace of change and resented the attention given to its most visible critics.
Reading the evidence with care
Two cautions apply. First, the popular image of 1967, with its flowers and festivals, can overstate how typical the counterculture was. Second, the survey data from the period was less detailed than modern polling, and some questions were not asked consistently across years. A careful reading is that American values moved toward greater individual freedom and greater scepticism of authority across the decade, that 1967 was a year when this became impossible to ignore, and that the country was left more divided about it than the headlines of that summer suggested.