Change and reaction
The social effects of the hippie movement cannot be separated from the reaction against it. Many Americans admired parts of the counterculture, many found it threatening, and the argument between the two helped shape politics from the mid-1960s onwards. As with culture, it is difficult to isolate the hippies from the wider forces of the time, including the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the arrival of the baby boomer generation at college age, and the spread of the contraceptive pill. What follows describes areas where the hippie example mattered, with the caution that it was one influence among many.
Attitudes toward authority
One of the clearest shifts was a decline in automatic deference to authority. Young people who saw the war as unjust, or who thought official statements on drugs and the war were misleading, learned to question governments, universities and employers. This distrust was not created by the hippies alone: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and later the Watergate scandal fed it. But the counterculture gave it a style, humour and a set of symbols, and for many it became a durable habit.
Within institutions the effects were mixed. Universities loosened rules on student conduct and dress, and some schools introduced informal teaching experiments. Workplaces, churches and the military kept more of their hierarchy, although all of them dealt with new pressures over appearance, language and discipline. Voting rights moved too: the Twenty-sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18, was ratified in 1971, in a debate in which the Selective Service draft was a leading argument.
Family life and the generation gap
The phrase “generation gap” was in wide use in the late 1960s. Hippie young people often rejected their parents’ values about careers, thrift, patriotism and propriety, and arguments about hair length and clothing were a visible sign of deeper conflicts. Many families were divided, and some parents were distressed when a child left school or home.
Over the long run, family patterns were changing for many reasons, including greater economic independence for women, a growing divorce rate and later marriage ages. Hippie communes and households tried alternatives such as shared child-rearing, but these were small in number. It is fair to say that the movement reflected and encouraged some of these changes, not that it caused them.
Sexual mores
Hippie ideals of openness, along with the availability of the pill, contributed to wider public acceptance of premarital sex and cohabitation by the 1970s. Public discussion of sexuality, including in magazines, theatre and film, became more frank. Some historians argue that the changes were already under way and that the hippies popularised them rather than started them.
The record is also mixed. Women in the movement sometimes complained that “free love” assumed their availability, and that men held most of the leadership roles. These complaints fed into the women’s liberation movement, which grew in the late 1960s, partly in reaction to attitudes in the New Left and the counterculture. The gay liberation movement is usually dated from the Stonewall riots of 1969 and developed alongside, rather than as part of, the hippie scene.
The backlash
For many Americans the hippies stood for disorder, disrespect and drug use, and politicians were quick to exploit this. Ronald Reagan, a former film actor, ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to restore order at the University of California at Berkeley and to deal with what he called the “mess” there. He won in November 1966 and took office in January 1967, and soon afterwards the university’s Board of Regents dismissed the president, Clark Kerr. As Governor Reagan he remained a strong critic of campus protest, and he won re-election in 1970.
At the national level, 1968 showed a divided electorate. Richard Nixon won the presidency that November, appealing to voters who wanted law and order, and George Wallace, running as a third-party candidate, won about 13 percent of the popular vote and carried five Southern states. Not all of those voters were responding to hippies, since race, the urban riots and the white backlash against civil rights gains were major factors, but the reaction to protest, long hair and perceived permissiveness was part of the mood. Nixon later spoke of a “silent majority” in a speech in November 1969.
Backlash also took legal forms. States and the federal government strengthened drug laws in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and police in many places targeted the visible signs of the counterculture, such as long hair and communal houses.
An uneven legacy
Which side prevailed is not simple. Politically, conservatism gained strength from the 1960s backlash, and Reagan became president in 1981. Socially, many attitudes associated with hippies about informality, sexual openness and scepticism towards authority became widespread. The most accurate summary may be that American society moved in both directions at once: more permissive in daily life, and more polarised in politics.