Yet one of the more remarkable aspects of American culture in the 1960s was the popularity of countercultural apostasy—the affirmation and embrace of its mutiny and flamboyance not only by youth but also by many of their middle-class elders. The sheer ubiquity of sympathetic books and articles on the counterculture in the popular press—capped by Yale law professor Charles Reich’s dulcet paean to The Greening of America (1970)—suggests that the “counterculture” may not have been as “counter” as both contemporaries and later observers thought.
