A hinge year
Historians often describe 1967 as a hinge. Before it, the 1960s could be told as a story of expanding hope: civil rights laws, the Great Society, a youth culture that seemed to be inventing a more open way of life. After it came 1968, a year of shocks that left many people feeling the country was coming apart. The year in between contained both moods, and almost everything that stands out about 1968 had roots in 1967.
It is worth being careful with this idea. Looking back, it is easy to treat every earlier event as a warning of what followed, when people at the time could not know. Still, the links are real enough to be worth tracing.
From 1967 into 1968
The most direct link was the war in Vietnam. Through 1967, American officials spoke of steady progress even as the number of American personnel rose and casualties mounted. When communist forces launched the Tet Offensive at the end of January 1968, striking cities across South Vietnam, the military result was far more favourable to the American and South Vietnamese side than the shock suggested, but the attacks seemed to contradict the optimism of late 1967. Public trust in official statements was damaged in ways that lasted.
Politics moved quickly. Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had entered the Democratic race as an anti-war challenger, performed far better than expected in the New Hampshire primary in March 1968. At the end of that month, President Johnson announced he would not seek re-election, a decision usually described as Johnson withdrawal. The antiwar movement, which in October 1967 had gathered at the Pentagon, had helped to move the argument from the margins to the centre of a presidential campaign.
The racial unrest of the summer of 1967 also fed directly into 1968. The Kerner Commission, set up by Johnson after the Newark and Detroit disturbances, reported at the end of February 1968 that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal,” and blamed white racism and structural inequality. The report was received coolly by the White House, and many of its recommendations were not enacted. Then, on 4 April 1968, the King assassination in Memphis set off disturbances in cities across the country. Congress passed a fair housing law within days, but the sense of a movement losing its most prominent voice never fully lifted.
Two months later, in June, the Robert Kennedy shooting at a Los Angeles hotel removed another central figure of the era, and the Democratic convention in Chicago that summer was marked by street clashes. Richard Nixon won the presidency in November on a platform of “law and order.”
Abroad, the year’s student unrest also spread. In France, the May 1968 strikes began as student protests and grew into a general strike. In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring was crushed by a Warsaw Pact invasion in August. Neither was a direct result of 1967, but both drew on a worldwide youth mood that had been building throughout it.
Politics in the 1970s
In the longer run, many of the era’s conflicts shaped the next decade. American ground forces in Vietnam reached a peak of more than half a million in 1968 and early 1969, then were gradually withdrawn. The Paris peace agreement was signed in January 1973, and Saigon fell in April 1975. The draft ended in 1973, and the voting age was lowered to eighteen by constitutional amendment in 1971, partly because of the argument that those old enough to be sent to fight were old enough to vote. Muhammad Ali’s conviction for refusing induction was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1971.
The war and then the Watergate scandal left many Americans more sceptical of government, a shift that can be traced in polling and in the tone of films and journalism. A conservative reaction grew too. Ronald Reagan, who became governor of California in 1967 partly by running against campus unrest and welfare, went on to be elected president in 1980. The movement of 1967 and the reaction against it should be seen as parts of the same story.
Culture after the Summer of Love
The cultural legacy is more mixed. The Summer of Love ended with disillusionment in the Haight, as overcrowding, drug problems and press attention changed the neighbourhood. The hopeful energy of 1967 moved into other things: communes, the early environmental movement, a growing women’s movement, new forms of music, and an alternative press whose best-known survivor, Rolling Stone, began in November 1967. Woodstock in August 1969 is often treated as the high point, and the violence at Altamont in December 1969 as a dark counterpart. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died in 1970 and Jim Morrison in 1971, which contributed to the sense that an era had ended.
The musical changes proved more durable. The idea of the album as a serious artistic statement, strengthened by Sgt. Pepper and other records of 1967, shaped popular music for decades. New Hollywood filmmakers carried the questioning spirit of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate into the 1970s, and a more open attitude to sex, drugs and authority gradually entered the mainstream, although not without opposition.
How the sixties are remembered
Memory tends to compress the decade into a handful of images, and 1967 supplies several: flowers, tie-dye, a Beatles album cover, a line of soldiers outside the Pentagon, a burning street. Each is true but partial. Most young people in 1967 were not hippies, many Americans supported the war, and the changes celebrated today came slowly and met resistance. Anniversaries, such as the fiftieth of the Summer of Love in 2017, have usually prompted fresh debate about which version of the year is the right one.
Perhaps the most useful way to think about the legacy is as a set of unresolved questions: how far a government can be trusted, how to share a country across racial lines, and how much freedom a society should give its young. People asked those questions in 1967, and they have not stopped asking them.