Love, peace and the flower
“Free love” and “peace” are the two words most people associate with the hippies. The second has the firmer record. Opposition to the Vietnam War was widespread in the movement, and flowers became its most recognisable emblem, so much so that the slogan “flower power” came to stand for the whole era. The first, free love, was real as an ideal but varied hugely in practice, and it is better treated as part of a broader debate about sexual attitudes than as a single policy.
Where “flower power” came from
The idea is usually traced to the poet Allen Ginsberg. In 1965, as the movement against the Vietnam War grew in Berkeley, Ginsberg wrote an essay often cited under the title “How to Make a March/Spectacle”. He proposed that demonstrators bring flowers, music, costumes and a festive spirit, and offer flowers to hostile onlookers, police and the Hell’s Angels, in order to defuse tension and avoid giving opponents an excuse for violence. The phrase “flower power” itself is generally credited to Ginsberg too, and the press and other activists took it up soon afterwards.
The approach was a deliberate contrast with the angry tone of some antiwar rallies. It treated protest as theatre and as an example of the world protesters wanted, rather than only as a demand. Flowers were also cheap, easy to hand out and photographed well, which made them effective for a youth movement that cared about public image.
The Pentagon march of October 1967
The best-known use of the idea came on 21 October 1967, at the March on the Pentagon, when tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington to protest against the war and many then crossed the Potomac to the Pentagon. At the building, protesters faced lines of soldiers and military police, and many people brought flowers. Photographs showed protesters placing flowers in the barrels of soldiers’ rifles. One image by a news photographer, Bernie Boston, taken that day and titled “Flower Power”, became one of the most widely reproduced pictures of the decade.
The photograph is partly iconic because it compresses a complicated event into a single gesture. The Pentagon confrontation itself was tense. Some demonstrators clashed with the troops, there were arrests, and the confrontation went on into the night. Norman Mailer’s account of the day, “The Armies of the Night”, published in 1968, shows how mixed the crowd was. Some people also joined a symbolic attempt, led by Ed Sanders and others, to “exorcise” the building, which is often remembered as a joke or a piece of street theatre, depending on who is asked.
Was it really nonviolent?
Historians and participants disagree about how closely the hippies followed the nonviolent tradition. On one side, the movement’s emphasis on love, flowers and refusing to fight was genuine. Many people joined peaceful demonstrations, and some chose conscientious objection or refused induction under the Selective Service draft. The tradition of nonviolent direct action also had roots in the civil rights movement and in the pacifist movement of earlier years, and some activists consciously linked it with theirs.
On the other hand, critics both inside and outside the movement argued that flowers alone did not stop a war. Some radicals saw flower power as naive or as a pleasant pose that left the system unchallenged. Others pointed out that the same crowds at the Pentagon included militants who were ready to confront the police. Veterans and military families sometimes took offence at what they saw as disrespect to soldiers, many of whom were draftees of the same age. The photograph of the flower in the rifle barrel was also used by opponents of the protest, who treated it as a symbol of naivety.
Free love in context
The same ideals of openness and joy were applied to sexuality, in what later became known as the free love ideals of the Summer of Love. The contraceptive pill, available since the early 1960s, had changed what young people could expect, and many hippies rejected the conventional ideas of marriage and sexual propriety. In practice, attitudes ranged from conventional monogamy to experimentation, and accounts of the period often point out that women in the scene were sometimes expected to take on household chores and to accept the sexual preferences of men. This is one of the reasons later feminist writers were critical of the “free love” label.
Why the image lasted
Flower power outlasted its moment because it was easy to understand and easy to reproduce. It gave the antiwar message a gentle face at a time of Vietnam War escalation, and it provided a counterweight to the idea that all protesters were violent. Whether it changed anyone’s mind is hard to know. What is clear is that the flower, and the more general language of peace and love, became part of the visual vocabulary of the late 1960s and the way it is remembered.