Two camps under one label
By 1967 the word “revolution” was in common use among young Americans, but it meant quite different things. Historians often describe two broad currents. One was cultural and psychedelic: change the individual’s consciousness, drop out of the rat race and build alternative ways of living. The other was political: organise against the war, racism and university authority, and change institutions by protest and pressure.
The two currents overlapped, shared music and some members, and were often lumped together by the press as “hippies” or “the counterculture”. But the differences were real, and the tension between them runs through the history of the period.
The psychedelic wing
The psychedelic side centred on LSD and similar drugs, used in the belief that they could open the mind and loosen the hold of conventional thinking. Its heartland was the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, with outposts in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Bands, poster artists and light-show makers created a visual and musical style around it, and many followers were more interested in art, spirituality and community than in electoral politics.
The best-known public advocate of this approach was Timothy Leary. A psychologist, he had worked at Harvard in the early 1960s on research with psilocybin and LSD, and left the university in 1963 amid controversy over the experiments. By the mid-1960s he had become a popular speaker, and in 1966 he founded a group called the League for Spiritual Discovery, which presented LSD use as a religious sacrament. Authorities saw it differently, and Leary had several legal troubles with marijuana charges over the following years.
Turn on, tune in, drop out
Leary’s most famous phrase, “turn on, tune in, drop out”, was spoken to the crowd at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park on 14 January 1967. The event gathered poets, musicians and thousands of young people in the park, and was widely reported in the press. Leary later said the phrase was suggested to him by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and he went on repeating it in lectures and interviews.
The meaning of the words is often misunderstood. To Leary, “turn on” meant becoming aware of the many levels of consciousness, “tune in” meant interacting harmoniously with the world, and “drop out” meant detaching from involuntary commitments rather than quitting society altogether, according to his later explanations. Many listeners heard it more simply as an encouragement to take drugs and leave school or work. Critics, including some people sympathetic to the counterculture, worried that it was reckless advice, especially for teenagers.
The political wing
The political wing grew out of the civil rights movement, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 and the growing campaign against the Vietnam War. Groups such as Students for a Democratic Society organised teach-ins, marches and draft resistance. For these activists, the main question was power: who made decisions about war, education and race, and how to change them.
Many political activists regarded the psychedelic scene with suspicion. They saw drug use and withdrawal as an escape that left the war and racial injustice untouched. Some hippies in turn considered the organisers too rigid and ideological, and thought mass politics was part of the problem they were fleeing.
Where the wings met
The camps were not walled off from one another. Allen Ginsberg, a poet of the Beat generation, appeared at both marches and be-ins and argued for a joyful, nonviolent style of protest. The Diggers in San Francisco combined free food and street theatre with a pointed critique of money and property. Rock concerts and underground newspapers carried both political and psychedelic messages.
The best example of a deliberate attempt at fusion was the Yippies, a group formed by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others at the end of 1967. They combined countercultural theatre with political provocation, and the name is usually linked to the “Youth International Party”. They are mainly a feature of 1968, and the Chicago Democratic Convention that summer was their most famous moment.
Why the split mattered
By late 1967 a sharper division was visible. The October march on the Pentagon showed that large numbers of young people would turn out for antiwar politics, while the “Death of Hippie” ceremony in San Francisco showed that the Haight’s original scene was under strain from crowding, crime and press attention. In 1968, a violent year, political confrontation took over much of the energy once associated with the psychedelic scene.
It would be wrong to say that one wing won. The psychedelic outlook faded as a movement but left its mark on dress, music and attitudes, while the political wing produced lasting organisations and tactics. Leary himself continued to be a polarising figure into the 1970s, and he served time in prison and spent years as a fugitive after a 1970 conviction, which helped cement his image as a symbol of the more extreme end of the period.