The unparalleled ascendancy to wealth that most Americans enjoyed in the first quarter-century following World War II did not mean that even that lucky majority enjoyed unalloyed happiness or serenity. Everyone did not live happily ever after. As the burdens of poverty lightened and the oppression of racism and other forms of bigotry began to lift, awareness of what evils remained and what progress could yet be made cultivated its own discontents. It was a phenomenon that the French commentator on American life, Alexis de Tocqueville, had noted a century earlier:

“Empowerment,” an expression that gained much currency in the 1960s as something to be desired, raised difficulties of its own. Emancipation from traditionalist roles, especially for women, permitted open-ended lifestyle options that would produce new anxieties. Largely successful challenges to constrictive traditions discomfited many who craved stability and who identified tradition not simply with custom but with morality.