Making the world a better place since 1968: how reason and freedom have changed since our humble founding in a turbulent year.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top - Editorial

1968 IS ONE of those special four-digit numbers that conjures up searing and contradictory emotions. Put the word "May" in front of it, and former hippies will smile at the memory of anarchic Paris protests while the squares they were tormenting scowl. Change that word to "Chicago," and the reactions may well be reversed.

Vietnam in 1968 was the nadir of a nightmare. American troop deployment and expenditures peaked, and that year saw 16,592 U.S. deaths--more than in every subsequent U.S. military intervention combined. Yet antiwar sentiment was potent enough to fuel the unlikely presidential candidacy of Eugene McCarthy, drive President Lyndon B. Johnson out of office, and give Richard Nixon an incentive to campaign on ending the military draft, which he finally did five years later.

A 68er in the former Czechoslovakia is one of the hundreds of thousands who emigrated to the West after that year's liberalizing Prague Spring (yay!) was crushed in August by Soviet tanks (boo!). A soixante-buitard in France is target of both envy (for helping shake the world back then) and scorn (for helping mismanage France ever since). From Belgrade to Belfast, Manhattan to Mexico City, baby boomers strained at the leash of authority, experimented with new forms of living, and suffered sometimes murderous backlash at the hands of government. It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.

Into this tumult strode a young Objectivist named Lanny Friedlander, a Boston University undergraduate furious at the authoritarianism he saw among both the cops and the protesters. (You can see Friedlander's sentiment expressed directly on our special pull-out poster of historical magazine covers, on the flip side of the iconic image for Robert Poole's February 1971 article on energy price controls, "Decline of an Empire") Vowing to bring logic and clarity to a world bamboozled by dogma and irrationality, Friedlander mimeographed together an unusual and visually arresting monthly he christened reason. It was an ideological Hail Mary pass against onrushing statism.

Against all odds, Friedlander's vision, and the ideas that animate our motto of "free minds and free markets" have gained remarkable traction in the 45 years since.

This special anniversary issue is dedicated to how the world has changed since that year of race riots, political assassinations, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey reminds us in "Seven Surprising Truths about the...