An exhibition from the archive

Dear Son, Dear Dad

In the autumn of 1967 Victor Lundberg, a 44-year-old advertising executive from Grand Rapids, Michigan, recited a letter to his teenage son over “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. It covered long hair, God and the war, and it ended with a threat: if you burn your draft card, “then burn your birth certificate at the same time. From that moment on, I have no son.”

Liberty Records put it out nationally. It entered the Billboard chart on 11 November, Lundberg read it on The Ed Sullivan Show, and within weeks sons, a daughter, a comedian and a television host were writing back, on record.