Vietnam, Protest, and Counterculture 497communities and schools, trying to weed out “un-American” teachers or argu-
ing for school prayer. Every major protest rally was sure to include right-wing
demonstrators as well, carrying sings like “America--Love It or Leave It” or
“Go Back to Russia, You Communists.” On various campuses, chapters of the
Young Americans for Freedom popped up. Clean cut, conservatively dressed, wear-
ing short hair and long skirts, these young people honored traditional values,
rejected the hippies and worked for conservative causes like the 1964 Barry
Goldwater campaign or other anticommunist issues, or against sex education or
pornography.
The counterculture was also commercialized and commodified during the
1960s. Commodities are generally goods that are bought and sold. But ideas
can be commodities too, if they are used for commercial purposes, and that is
one of the major legacies of the culture of the 1960s. Images of hippies and
“flower power”—already prevalent in advertisements in the 1980s and
1990s—were born in the Vietnam era. Like the characters in Mad Men, adver-
FIGuRE 9-16 Ku Klux Klan members supporting Barry Goldwater’s
campaign for the presidential nomination at the Republican National
Convention in San Francisco. An African American man pushes the
signs back, July 12, 1964