Separating influence from coincidence
Claims about the hippies’ legacy are easy to make and hard to prove. Many changes in American life after the 1960s had several causes, including the size of the baby boomer generation, new technology, economic change and other social movements. It is therefore safer to say that the hippie counterculture helped popularise or accelerate certain habits than to say it created them. With that caution, several areas are commonly cited.
Food and the natural-foods movement
Interest in whole grains, vegetables, brown rice and vegetarian cooking grew in hippie circles, partly from suspicion of processed food and partly from interest in Asian diets and in living more simply. The Diggers’ free stew, communal kitchens and cooperatives that bought food in bulk all reflected this outlook. Natural-food stores and co-operatives spread in the late 1960s and 1970s, often founded by people from this world.
Some of these businesses later grew into regional or national chains, and foods once seen as eccentric, including yogurt, granola and whole-grain bread, moved into ordinary supermarkets. Historians usually add that the shift also drew on earlier health-food traditions and on later environmental and nutrition concerns, so the hippies were one stream among several.
Yoga, meditation and Eastern religion
Interest in Asian religion was not new in the United States, but it grew sharply in the 1960s. Hippies took up Zen Buddhism, Hindu-influenced yoga, meditation and chanting, and they were drawn to visiting teachers. Ravi Shankar’s sitar music reached rock audiences and gave Indian classical music a wider hearing in the West, and his appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 is often mentioned. The Beatles’ well-publicised interest in Indian spirituality came more fully in 1968, after the 1967 hippie peak.
Over later decades yoga and meditation moved from the margins to widespread use, in gyms, schools and hospitals, often with their religious aspects reduced. Not everyone considers this a faithful adoption, and critics point out that it can strip practices of their context. The hippies’ role was to help introduce them to a mass audience in the first place.
Informal dress and manners
The shift towards casual clothing is one of the most obvious changes. Jeans, T-shirts, sandals, beards and longer hair on men moved from rebellious signals to ordinary choices over the 1970s. Workplaces, schools and churches gradually relaxed dress codes. The hippies were not the only cause, since youth fashion, new fabrics and a more relaxed postwar lifestyle contributed as well, but they made informality a mark of authenticity and put visible pressure on older rules.
First-name terms, less formal speech, more open talk about feelings and a general scepticism toward pompous authority are harder to measure, but frequently attributed to the period. They also reflect the wider youth culture and the influence of television.
Popular music
Hippie culture and rock music developed together. The San Francisco bands, the ballroom concerts, the extended improvisation and the albums designed as artistic statements all helped change what popular music could be. The Monterey Pop Festival and later Woodstock established the idea of the large outdoor rock festival, and FM radio stations with free-form programming gave airplay to longer tracks. Rolling Stone magazine, founded in San Francisco in November 1967, grew into a major voice for serious rock journalism.
Posters, album covers and psychedelic light shows also left a visual mark, and the idea that musicians could be artists with a message rather than only entertainers became more common. Some of this would have happened anyway, given the Beatles, Bob Dylan and others, but the San Francisco scene gave it a particular shape.
Attitudes and institutions of everyday life
Other changes are looser: greater tolerance for alternative lifestyles, interest in environmental protection, the idea of “doing your own thing”, and a belief that work and personal fulfilment could be linked. The communal living experiments mostly faded, but shared households and cooperatives stayed. Whether these are signs of a lasting counterculture or just a general loosening of conventions remains a matter of judgment.
A balanced view
The hippies’ legacy is sometimes inflated by nostalgia and sometimes dismissed by critics who see only drugs and self-indulgence. A more careful view is that they were part of a larger shift in American culture towards individual choice and informality, and that they supplied images, institutions and habits that carried the shift forward. Many of the movement’s specific political hopes were not realised, but its mark on food, faith, fashion and music can still be seen.