An old set of ideas in a new setting
The hippies of 1967 looked new, but most of what they believed had precedents. Historians who study the lineage usually point to several overlapping traditions: Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, the Beat Generation, the folk revival and the experiments of Ken Kesey and his friends. None of these produced the hippies on its own, and they are better seen as ingredients that a particular generation, in a particular place, happened to combine.
Romantic and Transcendentalist traditions
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European Romantic writers and artists such as William Blake and William Wordsworth valued emotion, imagination and nature over industrial rationalism. Those ideas are echoed in the hippies’ suspicion of machines, bureaucracy and the “straight” world.
In the United States, the Transcendentalists of the 1830s and 1840s, notably Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, argued for self-reliance, a direct experience of nature and a willingness to defy unjust laws. Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience and his account of living at Walden Pond were widely read by students in the 1960s. The Transcendentalists also took an early interest in Asian religious texts, an interest that returned in the hippie era in the form of yoga, meditation and Buddhism. There is no straight line from Concord, Massachusetts to Haight Street, but the vocabulary of individual conscience and simple living was familiar.
The Beat Generation roots
The most direct ancestors were the Beats. In the 1950s, writers including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder rejected the Organization Man conformity and consumerism of the postwar years, and wrote about travel, jazz, drugs, sexuality and Buddhism. Ginsberg’s “Howl” was first read in public at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and published by City Lights Books in 1956, and its obscenity trial in 1957 made the poem famous. Kerouac’s “On the Road” appeared in 1957.
The Beats gave the hippies a literature, a geography and a few role models. San Francisco’s North Beach and New York’s Greenwich Village were Beat territory before they became hippie reference points. Ginsberg and Snyder both appeared at the Human Be-In in January 1967, a visible link between the two generations.
There were also differences. The Beats were typically older, more urban and more cynical or solitary in tone; the hippies were younger, more communal and generally more optimistic. Some Beats were openly unimpressed by the hippies.
The folk revival
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a revival of American folk music swept through coffeehouses and campuses. Performers such as Pete Seeger and Joan Baez linked music to civil rights and peace causes, and Bob Dylan became its best-known songwriter. The revival taught a generation to see music as a vehicle for protest and community, and the Newport Folk Festival was a regular gathering point.
The folk world also produced the shift to rock. Dylan’s decision to play an electric set at Newport in July 1965 was controversial, but it helped open the path for folk-rock bands in California, such as The Byrds, and in time for the psychedelic bands of San Francisco. Several members of those bands, including Jerry Garcia, had played folk and bluegrass first.
Ken Kesey and the Acid Tests
Ken Kesey, the author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1962), took part in government-sponsored LSD trials while he was a graduate student at Stanford. In 1964 he and a group known as the Merry Pranksters travelled across the country in a painted school bus. Back in California, they held a series of “Acid Test” parties in 1965 and 1966, combining LSD, music, strobe lights and film projections. The Grateful Dead, then in their early days, played at several of them.
The Acid Tests helped create the template for the later psychedelic ballrooms, including the psychedelic light shows that became a signature of the era, along with loud amplified music, communal dancing and an invitation to take part rather than watch. The January 1966 Trips Festival in San Francisco, which Stewart Brand and Bill Graham helped organise, brought some of these ideas to a large public audience. Tom Wolfe’s book about the Pranksters, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, appeared in 1968 and told the story to a wide readership.
Kesey himself was ambivalent about what followed. He was arrested on marijuana charges in 1965 and 1966 and spent part of that time on the run, and by 1967 he was largely absent from the Haight scene.
What a historian takes from the lineage
The lineage suggests a few cautions. First, the hippies were not a spontaneous creation of 1967; the groundwork had been laid for a decade or more. Second, the heritage was selective: the hippies took up the Beats’ search for freedom more than their bleakness, and Thoreau’s simplicity more than his stern individualism. Third, the postwar cultural change and prosperity that supported the baby boomer generation, a large cohort of young people with time and money, was itself essential, and no earlier tradition could supply that.
Seen this way, the hippie movement was neither a sudden rupture nor a mere repeat. It was a new combination of older ideas, amplified by rock music, cheap travel and mass media.