Nostalgia runs high. Fifty years ago this month in 1967 a social experiment was taking shape that was to define a way of life that was counterculture, a rebellion against the Establishment, a time for sex, drugs and rock and roll. It was the unforgettable sixties and San Francisco’s HaightAshbury neighbourhood was at the heart of it. Today, residents say free love has given way to wealth and individualism.
It was the Summer of Love. A strange phenomenon was to grip America, it all began as largely an anti-war movement which bloomed into a protest against everything that stood for the Establishment. Kids started dropping out of school and college and heading towards San Francisco. Within about a year and a half, it had become a whole new subculture with hippie hubs blooming in every major US city – from Boston to Seattle; from Detroit to New Orleans. And soon nearly 300,000 people in some way or the other connected to the movement. But what was the movement all about?
It was a sudden social phenomenon that burst on the scene in the summer of 1967. More than a hundred thousand people, young and sporting what came to be known as hippie fashion and behaviour came together in Haight-Ashbury. They even got together in many other cities in the US, Canada and Europe. In fact, the word hippie is from hipster (used to describe kids who flocked into San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Hippies inherited the countercultural values of the Beat Generation.
The term “Summer of Love” originated with the formation of the Council for the Summer of Love during the spring of 1967 as a response to the convergence of young people in the Haight-Ashbury district. The Council was composed of The Family Dog, The Straight Theatre, The Diggers, The San Francisco Oracle, and approximately twentyfive other people, who sought to alleviate some of the problems anticipated from the influx of people expected during the summer. The Council also assisted the Free Clinic and organised housing, food, sanitation, music and arts, along with maintaining coordination with local churches and other social groups.
When the Hippies Took America
These hippies who later came to be called flower children were made up of an eclectic group of young men and women. Most were fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War which the US was engaged at the time far far away from home and just because it was a communist country. Most of the hippies were immersed in music, art, poetry and meditation.
It was a balmy summer day when thousands of anti-war activists and draft resisters backed by students and hippies that gathered in Washington DC to protest America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The rally came to be known as the March on the Pentagon and it was one of the first marches with a clear agenda – to not stop of short of shutting down the war effort even if it was only for a day.
Hippies were not just another wave of creative misfits, but more like creative crusaders trying to fight the basic values of society where it is most vulnerable – that it lacks soul. It was this idealism with which the hippies sought an alternate lifestyle, completely contrary to societal norms in the hope to generate a whole new world view that will revive the forgotten virtues of reverence and agape.
In a sense, hippiedom could be described as a transplanted Lost Horizon, a Shangri-La a go-go blending Asian resignation and American optimism in a world where no one grows old. It is in the hope of settling that precious state and defining his position in it, that the hippie uses drugs — first for kicks and then sometimes as a kind of sacrament. Anti-intellectual, distrustful of logic, and resentful of the American educational process, the hippie drops out — tentatively at first — in search of another, more satisfying world. Above all, hippies were promoting the idea of peace, love, unity and freedom.
Inspired by the Beat Generation of authors of the 1950s, who had flourished in the North Beach area of San Francisco, those who gathered in Haight-Ashbury during 1967 allegedly rejected the conformist and materialist values of modern life; there was an emphasis on sharing and community. The Diggers established a Free Store and a free clinic where medical treatment was provided.
"There was so much excitement in the streets and the parks and the hippie areas, and we thought if we could transmit this excitement to the stage it would be wonderful....’ We hung out with them and went to their Be-Ins [and] let our hair grow. It was very important historically, and if we hadn't written it, there’d not be any examples. You could read about it and see film clips, but you'd never experience it. We thought, this is happening in the streets, and we wanted to bring it to the stage.” This account was by James Rado the maker of that iconic Broadway musical, Hair, which opened off Broadway in October 1967.
Hair tells the story of the “tribe”, a group of politically active, long-haired hippies of the “Age of Aquarius” living a bohemian life in New York City and fighting against conscription into the Vietnam War. The young protagonists and their friends struggle to balance their young lives, loves, and the sexual revolution with their rebellion against the war and their conservative parents and society. Ultimately, one of them must decide whether to resist the draft as his friends have done or to succumb to the pressures of his parents (and conservative America) to serve in Vietnam, compromising his pacifist principles and risking his life.
The Sixties messiah Timothy Leary’s famous phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out” came to be the chisel for shaping the entire hippie counterculture, as it voiced the key ideas of 1960’s rebellion. These ideas included communal living, political decentralisation, and dropping out. The term “dropping out” became popular among many high school and college students, who would often abandon their education for a summer of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll.
50 years later, a different story
Today the San Francisco of the Sixties is a far cry from the days of Haight-Ashbury. If you visit San Francisco you can, by all means, wear some flowers in your hair, but with the acceptance that the summer of love is history. The bohemian idyll of Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters no longer exists.
The Bay Area today is the global headquarters of big tech. Here community is a euphemism for customers, disruption means starting your own company and free love means Tinder or Grindr. The San Francisco sound, which once referred to psychedelic rock groups, is now “ka-ching” – money. The city of Hollywood and Beverly Hills is one of the world’s most expensive and unequal cities where billionaires step over sleeping shapes on the sidewalks. Artists, writers and musicians once the heartthrob of the city is leaving for cheaper cities. Companies like Uber and Airbnb have appropriated the word sharing for the gig economy, itself a euphemism for perpetual work.
But then the fiftieth anniversary of one of the world’s most defining movements is not going unnoticed. If you stroll around HaightAshbury you will see people with backpacks lounging on benches, some holding flowers. The aroma of pot mingled with incense. Vintage clothing, Tibetan-theme stuff and handmade jewellery are lined across the streets. Posters with psychedelic swirls are splashed across the city – a reminder of the summer of love