Why leave home?
Seen from one angle, the San Francisco summer of 1967 was a movement of young people leaving the places where they had grown up. Many of those who came to the Haight were white, middle-class and from suburban or small-town backgrounds. They were often college students or recent leavers, and some were teenagers who had run away. Their reasons were mixed, and no single explanation covers them all, but a recurring theme in their later accounts was dissatisfaction with the lives that had been mapped out for them. This article looks at that revolt and at how the adult world reacted.
The suburban background
The postwar suburbs had been built for young families, with new houses, cars and appliances, and by the mid-1960s the oldest children of that generation were reaching their late teens and twenties. The baby boomer generation was unusually large, and it grew up with an economy that offered comfortable jobs and consumer goods. Critics, including sociologists and novelists, had long described the pressure to fit in. The cultural worry about Organization Man conformity, the sense that a career meant giving up individuality for a salary, was widely discussed, and it fed a sceptical view of corporate employment.
Some young people took these arguments seriously and drew practical conclusions. Rather than starting careers in business or following parents’ expectations, they chose poverty, music, art or travel. The change, in the broader sense, belonged to postwar cultural change and not only to one summer, but the Haight gave it a visible location.
Rejecting careers and consumerism
Participants often said they wanted to live more simply and communally, spend time on creative or spiritual pursuits, and avoid what they saw as empty consumption. In practice that meant a mix of low-paid jobs, odd jobs, selling newspapers or crafts, and reliance on friends and free services. Dress, hair and language marked the break: long hair, second-hand clothes and the new slang signalled a refusal of mainstream style.
The Vietnam War strengthened the mood. Escalation in 1967 and the Selective Service draft meant that young men faced the prospect of military service, and dropping out of conventional life, or protesting against it, was sometimes tied to this anxiety. The Haight was not mainly an antiwar movement, though, and many residents were more interested in music and personal freedom than in organised politics.
It should be noted that the rebellion was not universal. Many suburban teenagers stayed home, many young people of other backgrounds took different paths, and the scene was largely white. Some of the harshest criticism of the hippies came from other young people, and from civil rights activists who saw a movement of privileged youth able to choose poverty.
How adults reacted
Parents were often anxious and sometimes angry. Newspapers reported cases of families searching for missing children, and some parents travelled to San Francisco to look for them. Young people described a range of responses from their families, from hostility to reluctant tolerance.
The police and city government took a firm line. Mayor John Shelley and other officials worried about public health, drugs and crowds, and the police stepped up patrols and arrests in the Haight. In Sacramento, Governor Ronald Reagan, who took office in January 1967, was a public critic of campus protest and the youth scene, reflecting the views of many voters.
The press moved from curiosity to alarm. Early coverage was often sympathetic or amused, treating the hippies as an exotic subculture, but as reports of runaways, disease and drugs accumulated, the tone grew more critical. Films such as The Graduate, released at the end of 1967, showed that the theme of generational unease was reaching the mainstream.
The autumn collapse
By late summer, many of the original residents were worn out and the district had changed. The cold weather arrived, the school year drew many visitors home, and crime and hard drug use became more visible. On 6 October the neighbourhood held its mock funeral for the stereotype of the hippie, which was intended as a statement against the label and the publicity around it. Over the following months the community fragmented, with some people moving to the countryside and others to cities including New York, Los Angeles and Boston.
This was the start of the hippie decline in the Haight, though the scene’s influence continued in music, clothing and attitudes. The idea of leaving the mainstream did not disappear, and communes and alternative communities continued to grow through the early 1970s.
A fair summary
The word “uprising” suits the Haight in a social sense but not in a political one. It was a revolt of manners, ambitions and values by a minority of young people, which provoked strong reactions and a lot of publicity. Its success is easy to overstate: most of the participants returned to ordinary life within a few years, and many of its ideals proved hard to sustain. But the questions it raised about work, conformity and consumption continued to be debated well after 1967.