From local scene to national story
Before 1967 the hippie scene in San Francisco was small, loosely connected and mostly covered by local papers and the new underground press. By the end of that year, “hippies” were a familiar subject in magazines, newspapers and television news across the United States and in other countries. The change owed a good deal to journalists who were fascinated by the young people, their clothes and their drug use, and who found a ready audience among readers curious about, or alarmed by, a new youth culture.
This matters because the media image and the reality were not the same thing. Much of what the public knew about hippies in 1967 was shaped by the way editors and reporters chose to describe them.
The Time essay of 7 July 1967
The best-known piece was the cover story in Time magazine dated 7 July 1967, titled “The Hippies”. It described a “philosophy of a subculture”, and gave national readers an account of the Haight-Ashbury district, with its music, communal households, drug use and beliefs. It quoted people in the scene and discussed the Diggers’ free food. The tone mixed curiosity with some scepticism, and it worried openly about the dangers of drug use.
The essay appeared at the start of what would become known as the Summer of Love, when large numbers of young people were already heading to San Francisco. It is hard to say exactly how much it contributed, because many other outlets, including Life and Look, ran features on the same subject in the same months, but it is often cited as a marker of the moment hippies became a mainstream topic.
Television and a hit song
Television reporters followed. Network news programmes sent crews to the Haight, and documentaries and news specials showed viewers the costumes, the street scenes and the interviews. One CBS programme later in 1967, presented by Harry Reasoner, was reportedly among the best known of these reports, though viewers’ reactions varied, with some seeing it as a fair look and others as a sensational one. Television also brought in the visual style: bright clothes, flowers, beads and long hair were well suited to the new colour broadcasts.
Music added to the effect. “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)”, written by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and sung by Scott McKenzie, was released in the spring of 1967 and became a major hit, especially in Britain, and it invited listeners to come to the city. The Monterey Pop Festival in June, held on the California coast south of San Francisco, further raised the profile of the San Francisco bands.
Crowds arrive
Predictions in the spring of 1967 suggested that tens of thousands of young people would descend on San Francisco in the summer. Commonly cited estimates put the number of arrivals in the region of 100,000 over the season, but these are approximate and were not counted in any strict way. What is clear is that the Haight, a neighbourhood with limited housing, struggled to cope.
Residents and local groups worried about food, shelter, sanitation and health. Organisations such as the Diggers and the new Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which opened in June, tried to provide basic services. Many of the newcomers were teenagers, and some were runaways, which created further problems. City officials were unsure how to respond, and some local people felt that the press had advertised a place that was not able to accommodate the visitors.
Authenticity and its limits
An irony noted by many commentators was that the publicity undermined the thing it was celebrating. People who had been part of the earlier scene, including musicians and shop owners, were often unhappy with the attention. Some felt that the media had made “hippie” into a costume that anyone could buy, and that the label was now attached to tourists, to opportunists selling drugs and to people who had little interest in the original ideas. Merchants began selling beads and psychedelic posters to visitors, an early sign of commercial interest in hippie fashion.
The reaction came to a head in October 1967, when some residents of the Haight staged a mock funeral known as “Death of Hippie”, partly to reject the media’s version of the “hippie” and to say that the original community would carry on without the label.
What to make of it
It would be too simple to say that the press invented the hippies. The scene existed, with its music, communities and ideas, before the cameras arrived. But the national coverage of 1967 certainly changed its size and character, and it supplied an image that people in other places could imitate. It also set the pattern for how later youth movements were reported: first as a novelty, then as a problem, and finally as a marketable style.