What “counterculture” means
The word was popularised by the historian Theodore Roszak, whose 1969 book The Making of a Counter Culture described young people who rejected the technocratic, achievement-driven society of their parents. In everyday use it now covers a loose cluster of attitudes and communities in the United States and Western Europe, roughly from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. They shared a distrust of authority, an interest in personal freedom and experience, and a willingness to live differently from the mainstream.
It is worth being careful about scope. The counterculture was never a single organisation with a membership list, and most young people of the period were not part of it. Many stayed in conventional jobs, colleges and churches, and polls of the time repeatedly showed that older and more conservative attitudes remained widespread. What the movement had was visibility: its music, dress and slogans reached far more people than its committed participants.
Conditions behind it
Several postwar conditions are usually cited, and none of them explains the movement alone.
- Affluence. The American economy grew strongly through the 1950s and much of the 1960s. For many middle-class families, a degree of financial security meant their children could question careers and consumer goals rather than simply chase them.
- The baby boom. The large cohort born after the Second World War reached their teens and twenties in the 1960s. Colleges expanded, and large numbers of young people spent years together on campuses, which made it easier for new ideas and styles to spread.
- Cold War anxiety. Growing up with civil-defence drills and the threat of nuclear war left some young people sceptical of the adults who ran the system.
- The civil rights movement. Its tactics and moral language, from sit-ins to marches, gave many white students their first experience of organised protest.
- Vietnam and the draft. As the Vietnam War escalation of 1965 to 1967 raised troop numbers and monthly draft calls, the Selective Service draft turned a distant policy debate into a personal question for young men. Student deferments softened this for some, but not for everyone.
The main strands
Historians often distinguish several overlapping currents rather than one movement.
The bohemian and Beat inheritance. The movement’s Beat Generation roots lay in the 1950s writing of figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and in the coffeehouses and poetry readings of San Francisco and New York. The Beats supplied an early model of voluntary outsiderhood.
Politics and protest. The New Left grew from the civil rights movement and the free speech protests at Berkeley in 1964. Groups such as Students for a Democratic Society focused on participatory democracy, university reform and, increasingly, opposition to the war.
Psychedelic and spiritual exploration. LSD, marijuana and interest in Eastern religions fed a belief that expanded consciousness could change individuals and, in time, society. Timothy Leary became the best-known advocate, though many in the scene regarded him sceptically.
Music and the arts. Rock music, light shows, poster art and experimental theatre formed a shared public language. Bands in San Francisco, London and Los Angeles gave the movement a soundtrack that reached the mass market.
Communal and alternative living. Communes, free clinics, food cooperatives and the street-level aid organised by the San Francisco Diggers reflected an interest in building parallel institutions rather than only protesting existing ones.
These strands did not always get along. Political activists sometimes dismissed the drug-and-music scene as escapism, while many hippies saw organised politics as another version of the system they wanted to leave. The tension became more visible as the decade went on.
Why 1967 is treated as the peak
The movement did not begin in 1967 and did not end in 1968, but several things converged in that year. In January, the Human Be-In in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park drew a very large crowd, reportedly in the tens of thousands, and gave the scene national press attention. In June, the Monterey International Pop Festival and the release of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band showed that the new sound had a mass audience. Through the summer, thousands of young people travelled to Haight-Ashbury, and what newspapers called the Summer of Love became a media event; a widely read Time magazine feature on hippies appeared in July.
The same year also showed the movement’s limits. Overcrowding, hard drugs and inexperienced runaways strained the Haight, and in October some of its residents staged a mock funeral titled the Death of Hippie to protest the commercialised image of the scene. Meanwhile, the underground press spread the movement’s ideas across the country, and a protest march on the Pentagon later that month showed the political side of the youth movement at its most confrontational.
It also helps to remember that 1967 was a hard year for the country. Riots in Newark and Detroit that July, and rising casualties in Vietnam, were as much a part of the year as flowers and music. The cheerful image many people now associate with 1967 is a selective one.
What the counterculture left behind
Its effects are difficult to measure precisely, because later changes in dress, music, sexual attitudes, environmental concern and distrust of institutions had several sources. The counterculture was one of them, but not the only one. Some of its ideas were absorbed by commerce within a few years, and some of its experiments in communal living did not last. Others, such as interest in natural foods, informal dress and a more questioning attitude toward authority, became part of ordinary life. Historians continue to disagree about how much to credit the movement itself rather than the wider currents of the 1960s, and a cautious reading allows for both.