What “counterculture” means
The word was popularised after the late 1960s, notably by the historian Theodore Roszak in his 1969 book The Making of a Counter Culture. It describes a loose collection of young people, artists, musicians and activists who turned away from the dominant values of postwar middle-class America. There was never a single organisation, programme or membership list. The American counterculture was a mood, a set of habits and a web of local scenes, and people who were part of it often disagreed sharply with one another.
It is worth keeping the scale in proportion. Most young Americans in 1967 were not hippies. They went to school, worked, joined the military or started families much as earlier generations had. What made the counterculture significant was its visibility, its influence on music, fashion, publishing and film, and the strong reactions it provoked.
Roots before 1967
The movement did not appear suddenly. The Beat writers of the 1950s, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, had already questioned conformity and consumerism. Folk music revivals, the civil rights movement and the campus politics of the early 1960s supplied a model of dissent. At Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement of 1964 showed that students could confront a university administration and win national attention.
Another ingredient was the spread of psychedelic drugs, which are covered in more detail in a separate piece on psychedelic experimentation. In San Francisco, Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests of 1965 and 1966 and the dance halls that followed helped create a shared social scene. By 1966 the Haight-Ashbury district had become a gathering place for young people, musicians and small communities such as the Diggers, who offered free food and made a point of rejecting money-based exchange.
What it rejected
Work and consumption
Postwar America prized steady employment, a house in the suburbs and a growing stock of consumer goods. Many counterculture participants questioned whether a career built around those goals was worth the compromise. Some dropped out of school or left conventional jobs, took casual work, or tried to live cheaply in shared houses and rural communes. Critics at the time, and historians since, have pointed out that this was easier for people with family safety nets, and that many communes struggled with money, food and organisation.
War
Opposition to the war in Vietnam was the issue that most connected the counterculture to organised politics. As Vietnam War escalation brought rising draft calls, young men faced the Selective Service draft and decisions about deferments, conscientious objection, evasion or service. The cultural rebels and the activists of New Left politics overlapped but were not identical. Some hippies distrusted formal politics altogether, while many New Left organisers found the drug-centred scene unserious. The 1967 March on the Pentagon, which blended both strands, showed how they could briefly meet.
Sex and family
The contraceptive pill, available in the United States from 1960, and changing attitudes about marriage made open discussion of sex more common. Counterculture circles promoted what they called free love, though the reality was uneven. Women in these scenes often found that the new freedom still left them with domestic and supporting roles, which fed the women’s movement that grew later in the decade.
Authority
Perhaps the deepest theme was distrust of institutions: government, universities, the military, corporations, and the older generation as a whole. Slogans of the period turned scepticism into a style. Timothy Leary’s phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out” was widely quoted after the January 1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco, though it meant different things to different listeners.
Media, music and style
The counterculture built its own channels. The underground press shared news that mainstream papers neglected, and rock music, helped by the growth of FM radio, carried its attitudes to a wide audience. Songwriters such as Bob Dylan had set an example of the personal and political voice, and the Monterey Pop Festival and the Sgt. Pepper album of 1967 made the sound of the era hard to ignore. Hair, clothing and the look of the psychedelic rock posters in San Francisco became signals of belonging, a topic explored in the pieces on the hippie movement and hippie fashion.
How the mainstream reacted
Reactions ranged from fascination to alarm. In July 1967 Time ran a cover story on hippies, and television and magazines sent reporters to San Francisco, which brought a flood of curious visitors and young runaways during the Summer of Love. The attention strained the neighbourhood, and local residents and officials struggled with overcrowding, health problems and crime.
Politicians found the counterculture a useful target. Ronald Reagan, who won the California governorship in 1966, and who is covered in an article on Governor Reagan, campaigned against campus unrest and what he presented as a decline in standards. Police arrests for drug possession, curfew and vagrancy rose in the scenes where young people gathered, and in the United States LSD was made illegal in California in October 1966 and later across the country. Parents worried about runaways, and clergy and columnists debated whether the young were idealists or simply self-indulgent.
Over the following years the backlash fed into broader political realignments. Richard Nixon, elected president in 1968, appealed to a “silent majority” of Americans who felt alienated by protest and cultural change, a phrase he used prominently in a November 1969 speech.
A mixed legacy
The counterculture changed some things lastingly and others hardly at all. Informal dress, popular music, environmental concern, attitudes toward sexuality and suspicion of official claims all moved noticeably over the following decades, though historians disagree about how much to credit the counterculture itself rather than wider social forces. Some of its ideals were absorbed by commerce almost immediately, as advertisers borrowed the language of rebellion. Others faded as communes closed and the scenes of 1967 broke apart. By October 1967, a mock funeral called the “Death of Hippie” was staged in the Haight by local participants who felt that media attention had spoiled what they had built.
The best way to understand the period is to hold both views at once: a real challenge to assumptions about how to live, and a minority movement whose significance came as much from the reaction it provoked as from its numbers.