A phrase, not a revolution
The title of this article uses the word “revolution”, which is a loose description. The Summer of Love did not overthrow anything: it was a season of youth gathering, music and street activity in San Francisco in 1967, and “revolution” fits it only if the word is taken to mean a change in manners and attitudes. The more precise story is about the phrase itself, which was chosen and promoted by organisers in the spring of 1967, taken up quickly by the press, and eventually applied to the whole year and sometimes to the whole counterculture.
Where the phrase came from
The label was promoted by the Council for the Summer of Love, a group formed in the spring of 1967 by people in the Haight-Ashbury area’s businesses, publications and dance halls. They expected large numbers of young visitors when school ended and wanted to arrange food, housing and information, and also to put a hopeful name on the season. The phrase suited that aim: “summer” gave a date, and “love” gave an ideal. Exactly which individual first said it is harder to pin down than it is often made to seem, and it is safer to credit the organising council than a single person.
The mood was already in the air. The Human Be-In in January had been advertised as a “Gathering of the Tribes”, and musicians and poets were speaking about love and community. The slogan fitted that language and gave it a name for the coming months.
How the press spread it
Local newspapers picked up the plans first, and the national press followed. Coverage was heavy once the first large groups of visitors arrived in June. Magazines ran cover stories in the summer, including a widely noticed Time feature on the hippies in July 1967, and a major television network broadcast a documentary on the subject in the same season. Radio helped as well: Scott McKenzie’s single about San Francisco, written by John Phillips, was heard on Top 40 radio across the country and carried its own message about wearing flowers in one’s hair.
Newspapers also had a stock vocabulary ready. The word “hippie” had been used by local reporters since the mid-1960s, and it now became the standard label for the whole scene. Reporters tended to simplify. They stressed drugs, clothes and slogans such as flower power, and they often wrote about hippie slang and dress as though it were a code that explained the movement. Many of the people described disliked these labels and did not usually use them about themselves.
What the media created
It is useful to distinguish between what happened and what was constructed.
- A real community of musicians, artists, shopkeepers and volunteers existed in the Haight before the summer, and it had real institutions.
- The idea of a mass movement with a single philosophy was mostly created by mass media coverage that needed a clear story.
- The number of visitors increased because of publicity. Young people in other cities read about San Francisco and travelled there, in some cases after hearing the song.
- Much of the commercial image, including tourist tours of the district, followed the coverage rather than leading it.
This feedback loop was noticed by participants at the time. Reporters arrived to describe a scene, and their reports attracted more young people, who in turn became the next subjects. By autumn many original residents felt that the label had been taken away from them, which was the idea behind the Death of Hippie mock funeral on 6 October 1967.
The slogan afterwards
After 1967 the phrase kept spreading. It became a general label for the year and a template for describing other places and later anniversaries: people spoke of a “Summer of Love” in London or elsewhere, which stretched the term well beyond its original San Francisco meaning. Accuracy suffers when the name is applied loosely, since scenes in other cities had different roots and timelines.
The best use of the term is as the name of a particular season in a particular place, with a known organising body and a known media history. The wider cultural change it symbolises, a shift in values among young people in the 1960s, was real but had many causes and began earlier than 1967.