By 1967, the year of the Smithsonian's first Festival of American Folklife, the folk revival of that decade had dissolved into a youth movement deeply alienated from its national culture. It had created a culture of its own, with its own music and literature, its own pantheon of heroes, its own way of life—all swiftly appropriated with characteristic voraciousness, by the nation as a whole. It seemed impossible, in 1967, still more so in 1968, to think or to do anything that was not somehow a declaration of allegiance to one side or the other, in the bitter and unseemly struggle which disrupted the delicate equilibrium of social forces by which our democracy had conducted its business. The issues, of course, were fundamental: racism and war. Still more fundamental was the sinister polarization along racial and economic lines which ultimately eroded the heady idealism that had given the epoch its grandeur and glory. But to have been alive in those times, still more to have been young, could be exhilarating, when good and evil seemed so easily distinguishable, when it seemed that hatred, intolerance, and stupidity could be swept away with an establishment that had become the sole owner and proprietor of them.