Actually, it was a very content America that moved into the new decade of the 1960s.  A thaw in the Cold War between Eisenhower’s America and Khrushchev’s Soviet Russia was in place, a global economic recession in 1958 had quickly corrected itself and the economy was again booming, churches were full, and teenagers – members of the "Silent" generation ("Boomers" were still in grade school) – were enjoying high school football games and jitterbugging, strolling or doing the twist at the high school sock hops afterwards or heading to the drive-in restaurant for burgers, fries and shakes.  And family viewing of TV episodes of I Love Lucy was keeping America pleasantly entertained.  These were indeed "Happy Days."¹

And there was no reason to believe that this was not destined to go on forever. And so it would be ... for another few years or so.

To be sure there were various international crises that had to be addressed by the Washington government, but nothing that would cause Americans to feel that they were at war or such.  Americans trusted their leaders to do the right thing. And there was this matter at home about civil right for America’s "Colored" population that had been left behind in Middle-America’s great boom.  But in general, there was growing support for the NAACP in its quest for an opening up of a society closed to American Blacks, supposedly only a problem in the American South.  And Americans expected some real progress on that matter as well, with northern Americans heading  south to join fellow Americans in their quest for voting and social-cultural rights that all Americans were entitled to enjoy.

All in all, American life and its challenges seemed not only quite manageable, American life seemed to be very, very good.

However, the domestic political bliss the Americans had come to expect to exist rather permanently as a natural element of the "American way" was about to come under serious challenge as the country headed into the 1960s.  What Middle America was not seeing or at least understanding was that social-cultural trends going on at the time at home were soon going to undermine the very things they were most proud of: American democracy built on the ability of individual Americans to direct their own lives at home.

Since the early days of the English arrival to the shores of America; through the development of the American colonies, reinforced by the rebellion against English King George III in his effort to force Americans under his direct rule; through the years of the Anglo spread westward into the lands of the plains Indians and the Mexicans; through a savage battle of cultural wills over the issue of slavery; through the years of the development of a massive industrial economy; through two world wars – Americans as individuals had personally carried forward the country in its development, one by one, men, women, and even children.

But now things were changing.  The principles of "corporatism" (corporate planning and management relating to all social matters) that had been developing slowly among the Vets both during and since the end of World War Two would spread as a central guiding principle of life in the 1960s.  Planning and management "from above" would slowly replace this idea of American personal self-sufficiency in area after area of American life.  It would take over the American world of education, religion, science, health, the media, as well as the government and the military. Social action would be increasingly understood to function better under corporate-style management.

Thus although Vet middle class life was ideologically highly opposed to any authoritarian infringement on the freedoms of the people, the Vets themselves understood "freedom" more in social terms as collective or national freedom, rather than as personal or individual freedom.

And most ironically, their Boomer children, who were being taught to see things in exactly an opposite fashion, entirely from an individualistic viewpoint ("do your own thing"), would actually cause this principle of corporatism to advance even faster, as Boomers left social responsibilities to the professionals (government officials mostly) in order to focus entirely on their own personal fortunes.

In short, personal Christian cooperation laid out in America centuries earlier by the Puritans as the main organizing principle of American social life would soon find itself being replaced by purely secular corporatism, actually just a subtle form of authoritarianism, the very thing Americans had supposed that they, in all the world, were the people most responsible for resisting and overthrowing, wherever such authoritarianism had taken over the lives of people and nations.

¹Happy Days was the name of a very popular TV program that ran from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s – looking back to this era of the late 1950s and early 1960s as a time of innocence and simple joy … in sharp contrast to the confusion, frustration and often anger of the era which followed it.