As we know now, just about every one of these conclusions was soon — in some cases very soon — proved wrong. By the end of 1965, there would be 180,000 American troops in Vietnam. Four years later, the metastasizing conflicts in Southeast Asia and at home would motivate a fair number of Americans both black and white to take to the streets to try to burn the place down.

Looking back at 1964 from the vantage point of 2014, you realize that one revolt was already in full swing and having a visible impact: the radical transformation of American culture. The February night that the Beatles first played The Ed Sullivan Show was hardly the night that changed America, but it was part of a wave that was unstoppable, no matter how much the powers that be, from show-business moguls to plain old middle-class suburban parents, tried to resist it. Revisiting 1964, you can see the old order fracture week by week.

The Times started mobilizing against the British Invasion even before the Beatles landed in February. When a filmed segment of the band turned up on The Jack Paar Program after New Year’s, the television critic Jack Gould declared that “on this side of the Atlantic it is dated stuff.” Once the Beatles appeared live in New York on Ed Sullivan, Gould dismissed them again, likening their shaggy hair to the wig worn by the morning-­children’s-show host Captain Kangaroo. A front-page news story theorized that the Beatlemania “craze” faced “an awful prospect of demise.”

Such reaction was universal, across the cultural and political spectrum. At The New Yorker, “The Talk of the Town” subcontracted Beatles commentary to a young music fan who pronounced the group inferior to the Everly Brothers. The Washington Post went to the Beatles’ debut concert and branded them a “commonplace, rather dull act that hardly seems to merit mentioning.” William F. Buckley Jr. found the Beatles “not merely awful” but “God awful” and “appallingly unmusical.” The Nation dismissed them as a “very safe” diversion for the complacent upper-middle class. Robert Moses refused to book the Beatles at the World’s Fair, though they would soon fill the new Shea Stadium next door. He instead stuck with nightly concerts by Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians, whose pre-jazz brand of easy-listening band music dated back to the late ’20s. Lombardo, Moses insisted, was “a favorite with many of the kids, if not the wildest ones.”

The effort to push back against an incipient counterculture extended well beyond music. Lenny Bruce was arrested for indecency at Café au Go Go in the Village. Pop Art was seen as a juvenile prank: When the architect Philip Johnson commissioned an Andy Warhol mural for the fair’s New York State pavilion, the result, a jamboree of homoerotic police mug shots titled 13 Most Wanted Men, had to be painted over within days to spare Rockefeller a potential political embarrassment. The perennially best-selling novelist John O’Hara was ubiquitous at the Times and New Yorker, but the upstart Frank O’Hara, whose Lunch Poems was published in 1964, barely registered. A nascent revolution in Hollywood also flummoxed cultural gatekeepers. Confronted with the breakthrough black comedy of the Cold War era, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the Times critic Bosley Crowther admitted it was funny but also condemned it as “dangerous.” “Is Nothing Sacred?” was the headline of one of two follow-up pieces he wrote for the Sunday paper. How, he wondered, could a movie have the gall to mock “top-level scientists,” diplomats, “the experts,” prime ministers, and “even the president of the United States” as “fuddy-duds or maniac monsters who are completely unable to control the bomb”? As if to accentuate how far removed such Establishment taste was from this anarchic new fever loose in the American bloodstream, the same editions of the Times featured ads for the notorious Elizabeth Taylor–­Richard Burton turkey Cleopatra, crowing that Crowther had named it “one of the year’s ten best” in 1963.

Resistance to this cultural sea change crumbled swiftly. Even Crowther beat a hasty retreat, putting Strangelove on his 1964 ten-best list in December despite having labeled it “defeatist and destructive of morale” in February. ABC, eager to ride the youth wave, preempted its long-running Western series Wagon Train in November for a Beatles concert. The network also pitted a new rock-and-roll series, Shindig!, against CBS’s cornpone hit The Beverly Hillbillies, ending its reign as the No. 1 Nielsen show. The squarest of television variety hours, The Hollywood Palace and The Red Skelton Hour, felt compelled to compete by booking another new English invader, the Rolling Stones—much to the annoyance of Dean Martin, who insulted the Stones on-camera in his role as Hollywood Palace emcee. It’s hard to believe that a Belgian novelty act, the Singing Nun, had been at the top of the charts when 1964 began. Meet the Beatles would soon outsell the best-selling popular-music long-playing disc of the postwar era, the Broadway cast album of My Fair Lady. Columbia, the august label that had released My Fair Lady and often dominated the popular and classical music industries, released two new Bob Dylan LPs in 1964 alone. Whatever critics or Robert Moses had to say, the cultural marketplace was racing to go where the customers were and commodify every development bubbling up from below. Capitalism trumped any objections from the doomed status quo.